


Widowmaker

by Spacewoman



Category: Punisher (Comics), The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: Abuse, Aftermath of Torture, Aftermath of Violence, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Gun Violence, Torture, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-25
Updated: 2018-08-01
Packaged: 2019-05-28 09:17:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 20
Words: 59,786
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15045809
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Spacewoman/pseuds/Spacewoman
Summary: She's nobody. Just a ghost, another Kitchen widow screaming in the dark, one more victim bleeding on the floor.Until she's not.





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first time so be gentle.
> 
> I'm only halfway through the Punisher on Netflix right now, but Jon Bernthal is hands down my favourite live action depiction of Frank Castle ever. I do rely more heavily on the comics for the characterisation, but I suppose there's a headcanon for me where this could fall someplace along the timelines of the TV shows as well.
> 
> Obviously I own nothing.
> 
> Carry on.

She hadn’t recognized him, even though he was sitting in her section.

Later, when Jenny remembers that night, she remembers noticing him, the sheer massive size of him hunched down in a baseball cap and a bulky blue canvas jacket, with bruises and a sad look on his face.

He’d sat in the back, facing the entrance of the diner and only ordered coffee, black. He’d called her  _ ma’am _ . She remembers thinking he must be one of the homeless guys that come into the diner when it gets cold out, that it’s pretty chilly for October, and he’s probably ex military, because a lot of those guys are and they're the ones that call her  _ ma’am _ .

She remembers pouring him his coffee, and she remembers him looking shifty.

“Can I get you anything else? You hungry?”

He’d looked at her with a flicker of surprise, distracted from glancing obsessively at the door, like he was worried about going back out there or something. Later, she realizes he'd been worried that what was out there was going to be coming in.

“No, thank you, ma’am.”

And she remembers pouring him soup on the house, which means soup she paid for, into a paper cup and putting it in front of him, the coffee pot held in the other hand. He’d looked familiar then, tugging at a memory, but the cap was distracting and the bruises were a little…

“On the house, sir,” she’d said, pushing the soup towards him. “It’s cold out there.”

And Jenny doesn’t remember much of what happened next, just guns, big guns, the biggest guns she’d seen in her whole life – or at least, up until that point of her life – and thinking that the sound of gunfire was so much louder than she’d been led to believe by television.

She remembers one of the bullets shattering the coffee pot in her hand, glass flying everywhere, coffee exploding all over the table. She remembers the dull pain of something on her hands, and then the other, brighter, louder pain that tore through her stomach. She remembers him practically tackling her to the floor, and then she remembers laying on her back, breathing heavily, and thinking how quiet the world had gone, wondering if she’s gone deaf from all the bullets and the guns firing.

She knows she hasn’t when she hears a big boot shuffling through the broken glass pieces beside her. A large body, massive and hulking, baseball cap gone now, looms, then crouches beside her. She recognizes him then.

“Here,” he says, voice rough, breathing heavy, wrapping something in his hands. A torn piece of cloth she thinks. He takes her hand, which hurts and stings and smells like burnt coffee, and puts it over the cloth on her stomach where it hurts most. “Keep pressure there until the ambulance gets here.”

“It’s okay,” she says softly, not really thinking, just understanding somehow that this is the man who’s going to kill her. She looks up at him, into that serious brow and the intense eyes, looking sad and tired and a little afraid. “It’s okay,” she says again, lifting her hand from where he’d placed it and wrapping her fingers around his massive forearm. He looks at it, then back at Jenny, eyebrows lifted in surprise. “I don’t mind, it’s okay. I’m ready. It’s okay.”

Beyond that, she doesn’t remember much at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Technically, Jenny Cesare isn't an OC, but this version of her is my own. If you haven't read the Punisher MAX comics, then I guess that won't matter, but if you intend to, it's worth the read.


	2. Alive

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “My name’s Frank,” he says, and it almost makes her laugh.
> 
> “I know.”
> 
> He pauses at that, as though waiting for her to go on, but she doesn’t need to elaborate. There isn’t a New Yorker left who doesn’t know the Punisher on sight.

There is a ringing sound in her ear. It is persistent, loud, deafening. Her stomach hurts, it hasn’t hurt like this since… What is that _sound_? She turns her head, trying to stifle it against something, teeth clenched.

“Try not to move, you lost a lot of blood.”

She opens eyes she doesn’t remember closing. It’s dark, yellow light bathing concrete floors. Jenny can feel a mattress underneath her. It smells used, laced with a metallic scent overlaid with stale cigarette smoke. No sheets, no pillow. Just a mattress on a concrete floor, a scratchy blanket, and a pair of boots she can sort of see.

“Where am I?”

“You’re safe.” The boots stand up. The Punisher steps into the yellow lights, eyes shadowed by his sharp forehead, brows drawn in unhappily. He stops a short distance away from the mattress, absently rubbing a grey piece of cloth over a gun barrel. He isn’t looking at her face, he is looking at her abdomen.

She can’t look away from him. From on her back like this, he looks a hundred feet tall. She touches carefully where the pain is most intense. Rough bandages meet her fingertips, and nothing else. She’s undressed, even her underwear cut away.

“You patched me up?” she asks, voice hoarse.

He looks at her face then, dark eyes latching onto hers with an intensity that makes her hold her breath. “Yeah. It isn’t my best work, but it’ll keep what’s on the inside in.”

Her throat feels dry. She finally looks away, unable to hold that gaze, tilts her head a little to try and catch a glimpse of the bandage. It’s a pretty big bandage, and she’s definitely naked under the scratchy blanket. She swallows hard.

The Punisher kneels next to her, picks up a water bottle which looks tiny and silly in his big scarred hands, twists the top and holds it out for her. “Try to drink,” he says, sounding more demanding than coaxing.

Jenny pushes up to her elbows, a painful slow process that pulls uncomfortably at the skin around her new stitches. When she’s mostly upright, a wave of dizziness crashes over her, almost knocks her back down, but she manages to stay up. He hasn’t tried to help her, hold her up, or touch her. She’s grateful for that. She reaches for the bottle, and he steadies it to her lips.

It is the best thing she’s ever tasted. She drinks greedily, but he _tsks_ and pulls the bottle away from her. “Slow down or you’ll make yourself sick,” he admonishes, again sounding more angry than concerned. Then, in a rush, he says, “What’s your name?”

“Jenny,” she says before she can think about it or wonder why she’s telling a mass murderer her real name.

“My name’s Frank,” he says, and it almost makes her laugh.

“I know.”

He pauses at that, as though waiting for her to go on, but she doesn’t need to elaborate. There isn’t a New Yorker left who doesn’t know the Punisher on sight.

“I’m not gonna hurt you,” he says then.

“I know.”

“You know who I am, but you know I’m not gonna hurt you.”

“You saved my life.” She swallows. “I don’t think you’d bother if you were just planning to hurt me.”

He is quiet at that. Eventually he lifts the bottle back to her lips. “Drink. _Slowly_.”

She sips, afraid of drinking too fast and having it taken away again. When the bottle disappears, she is disappointed to realize she’s emptied it. The Punisher – Frank, he says, his name is _Frank_ like they’re meeting up on a blind date or something – picks up another one, twists off the cap. “Can you drink some more?”

She nods, clutching the blanket to her chest. He doesn’t seem to even notice she’s naked, let alone care, but with her eyes adjusting to the pale streetlamp outside wherever this is, she can see Frank’s muscles, arms thick and a dull glint of a gun probably or a knife strapped to his thigh. It makes her feel small and vulnerable. His dog tags catch the light. She stares at them.

“Am I making you nervous?” he asks quietly, as though afraid of the answer.

Jenny looks back up at him, his unhappy brow and his lips pursed into a thin line. He has a raised white scar on one side of his chin.

“No,” she lies.

He frowns like he can tell, but he holds the water bottle up to her lips and lets her drink again. She only drinks a few sips before she lifts her hand to push it away, fingers brushing over the scarred back of his hand.

“Why did you bring me here?” she asks, voice still a little hoarse but closer now to the way she thinks it’s supposed to sound.

“Told you, it’s safe.”

“I mean…” she hesitates, eyes flickering back to the dog tags. She questions how wise it is to be arguing this with the Punisher, but then her eyes dart back to his face. He looks… miserable. “You could have left me there,” she says quietly. “Ambulance would have gotten to me eventually. You didn’t have to save me.”

He is quiet for too long, before his eyes dart to her wedding ring, settling somewhere around her chin. “Yeah well, I figured if you were suicidal I could do a better job of keeping you alive than an ambulance.”

Her face heats up at that, cold anger snatches her throat and she hisses, “I am _not_ suicidal.”

He chuckles, standing up in a creak of weapons and boots, dog tags chiming softly against his massive chest, towering over her. “Yeah.”

He goes back to the edge of the room, sits heavily on a chair at a crooked table, and picks up the barrel and the grey piece of cloth again.

She wraps the blanket more tightly against herself, wincing at the persistent ache in her side and stomach. “I’m not suicidal,” she says again, without any of the vehemence of the first time, just a sad little whisper that makes her heart race.

“Look, whatever it is you think you’re going through, offing yourself isn’t the answer. The people who love you will never forgive you for it.”

“The people who love me are dead,” she says, that same sad little voice, speaking without permission because she can’t think straight with that ringing in her ears and the godawful _hurt_ in her stomach.

"Then the memories of them that only you carry live inside you. If you die, that part of them dies as well."

“What does it matter to them? They're already dead." Her voice cracks and she hates herself. "You should understand that better than most,” she adds, bitter. She shuffles uncomfortably, gets herself back down slowly onto her back. It helps but not by much. She grits her teeth and breathes sharply.

“I don’t have any painkillers,” he says from his crooked table. Then, more quietly, “I’m sorry.”

She doesn’t want to turn her head to face him, but she can’t help herself. He is half hidden in shadows, still holding that rag, the clatter of gun metal on wood and the creak of his chair. She doesn’t know how he can even see enough to tell what he’s doing.

“I wasn’t looking to kill myself,” she says finally. He hesitates with a piece of something black and jagged in his hand, and she can _feel_ his attention on her, like a physical thing. “But I wasn’t looking to be saved either.”

“Am I supposed to understand that better than most, too?”

She manages not to look this time, staring fixedly at one shadow in the ceiling rafters that appears darker than the others.

“So who did you lose?”

“You’re really gonna ask me that?” she asks, that anger bubbling up inside her throat again.

“Why the hell not? You know everything about me, apparently.”

She swallows down a sharp response. But her throat is already closing up with grief at the question. “My ma,” she croaks, humiliated to find there are tears gathering in the corners of her eyes. She blinks furiously at the darkness. “She had a headache one day. Just fell down and wouldn’t get back up.” _Aneurism_ had been the word of the day back then. Good word for a sixteen year old to learn.

Frank makes a sympathetic noise. “I’m sorry to hear that. It must have been hard on you and your father.”

“Never knew my father,” she says absently. “Just me and Ma.”

He’s quiet for a long time, then he says, “I lost my mother, too. She was a saint. It’s never easy losing your mom.”

“Yeah but we’re made to lose them. We’re built to lose our parents and survive them. It’s how the world works.”

“So who else was it then? Who couldn’t you survive losing?”

The tears she had been blinking back furiously race down the sides of her face, catch in her ears, make loud dripping noises on the mattress. “My husband. Daniel.”

“I’m sorry,” he says again, voice rough.

“He saved my life too, you know,” Jenny says, smiling a little to herself as the tears keep falling. “Found me in a dumpster, dying of alcohol poisoning. Took me to a hospital, found me a place to stay.” Her voice is choked with tears now.

“What happened to him?”

“Just… just some kid,” she says, voice tinged with disbelief the way it always is when she recalls what happened. “No criminal mastermind or drug lord or nothing, just some poor dumb kid who needed money for his grandma’s medicine, who didn’t know how to keep the safety on a gun, who didn’t mean to shoot my Daniel.” Her voice breaks on a sob. “He shot him. He’s dead. He’s dead and everyone acts like it’s not the end of the world. I’m supposed to just grieve and move on, and then live a life, and have things, and be around people, but my husband _died_. My husband was shot for no fucking reason and I can’t pretend like that’s ever going to be okay, like it’s ever not going to feel like there’s a hole in my life where all the good and love and happiness used to be!” She is crying in earnest now, unable to stop. “I can’t feel it anymore. I can’t feel anything! No matter how much I live or breathe or fuck, nothing helps, nothing makes me feel… I can’t do this without him. I can’t do this without him!”

Jenny sobs, lifts up her hand and covers her face, ashamed and angry and choking on her own uselessness. He doesn’t shush her or comfort her, doesn’t tell her it’s going to be okay. He doesn’t come to her or put his hand on her shoulder, he doesn’t even stop cleaning his gun. He sits there at the table, hidden in shadows, and he says, “I know.”

And he does.

* * *

The next time Jenny wakes up, there’s sunlight streaming through the dirty window. She still hurts, and she’s still naked, and she feels disgusting, and she needs to pee. She turns her head a little towards the table. It’s better lit now, and she can see what looks like an arsenal spread out on the surface, but no sign of Frank.

Slowly, carefully, she gets to her feet. Walking straight hurts, and walking hunched hurts, so she wraps the blanket around her shoulders and walks hunched because she doesn’t have the energy for posture.

Beyond the table there’s a door, which leads to – thank Christ – a bathroom. She takes care of business, then runs the water from the tap as long as she can, scrubbing at her face, her neck and underarms, her chest and her feet. There are traces of smeared blood on her body, like someone had tried wiping it down but hadn’t been very attentive about it. She washes that off, too. She feels mildly more human, but still pretty rank.

When she rewraps herself and exits the bathroom, she smells food. Frank is unloading takeout containers on the floor beside the mattress. “I got you fried rice. Carbs are good for you, they’ll get you your strength back.”

She walks, straight this time, to the chair by the rickety table and slowly lowers herself into it. Frank looks at her over his shoulder, amusement ticking the corners of his mouth, then carries the takeout containers to the table instead. He moves the handguns around, four of them in various sizes and one of them with a wicked looking long barrel, then puts a foam container and a spork in front of her.

“Eat.”

Jenny is famished. She opens the container, but the sight of the rice makes her feel a little sick. She holds the spork in one hand, clutches the blanket around her shoulders with the other. “You got anything I can wear?”

He looks at her then, and – of all things – _blushes_. The Punisher, looking at her, thinking she’s naked and blushing like a virgin at prom.

He doesn’t say anything, just reaches into a duffle bag by the window and pulls out a truly massive t-shirt. He hands it to Jenny, then turns his back to her politely while she stands up, drapes the blanket over the back of the chair, and pulls it on. Lifting her left arm hurts like hell, but eventually she manages, stretching out the collar probably a bit too much. The t-shirt hangs down to her knees, but leaves absolutely nothing to the imagination regarding the shape and size of her breasts, or the fact that she’s so cold her nipples could cut glass. There’s a crude skull on it, and it makes her shiver.

"You got a jacket?"

He grunts. "You decent?"

"That'll be the day," she snorts, limping inelegantly to where she sees his jacket draped across a broken chair. It's heavy, navy blue canvas that looks almost black. It smells like cigarettes and beer and coffee, and she bites her lip when getting her left arm through the sleeve makes her dizzy. "I'm decent," she announces, voice tinged with amusement. He turns back to her, flicks an eye over the jacket and her bare knees and bare feet, then reaches again into the duffel.

He waits until she's sitting in the chair again before he approaches, kneels in front of her and rolls an enormous sock onto one foot, then the other. It goes halfway up her calf, but is thick and gray and warm. It smells like cheap detergent and maybe gunpowder. She doesn't argue that she doesn't need the socks, or even that she can put them on herself. She is oddly touched by the careful way his big rough hands handle her freezing feet, and completely embarrassed about her hairy as hell legs, but it's October and she wasn't counting on being naked in a wanted criminal's safehouse or whatever.

"Thanks," she says, a little awkward.

"You seem to be getting around okay. Is there anyone you can stay with while you get back to a hundred percent?"

"No," she says, feeling her gut drop and turning back to the spork and the rice so he doesn't see her face fall. "It's fine, I can manage on my own."

He stares at her a little, that physical intensity look, then gets up and grabs one of the takeout containers for himself. They don't speak while they're eating, a thick uncomfortable silence. Jenny doesn't know why the thought of going back to her studio apartment makes her chest clench like this. She's been living there since Daniel died, almost two years ago now, and while she's never looked forward to being home the way she knows a lot of other girls do when the days at work get long and painful, she's never felt suffocated by the inevitability of eventually having to go back there either.

The night before had been like going to church used to feel, back when she was religious and the ceremony and incense had made her feel close to her ma, before Tim and the hospital and the endless binge that became her life after. She hasn't been to church in years, she realises. It makes her put down her spork, appetite lost.

"I'm going out tonight," he says from his corner, like they're talking about their plans for the evening. "I got something to take care of. I'll take you home tomorrow."

"Don't worry about me," she snaps, that anger spreading up her chest and around her throat, "I don't need anyone to _take_ me anywhere. I can get home on my own."

He grunts at that, but doesn't argue. It makes her even angrier. She stabs the spork into the foam container too hard, breaks off a tine, then tosses it across the table in frustration.

Frank cleans up meticulously, disappears and returns a few times, and spends the rest of the time religiously cleaning his guns. They are both completely silent, while Jenny stubbornly takes laps around the warehouse, ostensibly to prove to him that she's capable of taking care of her own damn self, but also because he's tense and coiled full of the kind of energy that makes her jumpy, and she can't bring herself to lay down and sleep while he's there.

When the sun sets, he gets up, straps himself up with more guns than she thought it was possible to carry, and looks at her. She thinks he wants to say something, but she has no inkling what, except maybe to fervently hope she won't be there when he's back. His mere presence is exhausting, tense, heavy enough to suffocate her.

Jenny watches him leave, and doesn't say anything either. A few minutes after she's sure he's gone, she finally lays down and closes her eyes.


	3. Awake

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “This is my fault,” he says finally, eyes intent on his feet. “I was supposed to keep you safe from yourself, not throw you into shit you got nothing to do with.”

The sounds of heavy footfall wake Jenny, and for a moment she can't remember where she is. When she does remember, she turns her head, annoyed and ready to snap at him to be a little more considerate, but it isn't him. There are too many shapes in the dark, too many shoes, fancy Italian leather shoes, not soft faded combat boots. Her voice dies in her throat, and her breath comes in short pants.

"He ain't here," someone says, but another shushes him. "What?"

"If he ain't here, then who the hell is  _ that? _ "

Jenny tries to sit up too fast, pulls on her stitches, but she doesn't care, scrambles across the cold concrete for the duffel bag, hoping against hope there's a big ass gun in there that is as easy to shoot as they make it look like on cheesy cop shows, because the feet are stomping towards her and someone is laughing.

The hand that catches in her hair is rough, twisting in that special way that makes it hurt, but she stays quiet, letting him manhandle her to her feet. Something warm drips down her side, down her left leg, into the big gray sock and soaks into the concrete. Yeah, definitely tore a stitch.

"I don’t believe this," someone laughs, and he sounds like he's genuinely pleasantly surprised, like someone's surprised him with flowers or a Starbucks gift card or something. "A  _ girl.  _ He left a  _ girl  _ here."

Jenny wisely keeps her mouth shut, eyes down.

"Girl in her skivvies," another guy says, fingers teasing up her thigh.

She smacks his hand away and the others laugh, the one with the hand in her hair catching her wrist. It hurts, coffee burns still tender and kind of sore, and he squeezes too tight, bones rubbing together. There’s a fourth guy, hanging out by the back, looking at her like she’s the most boring thing he’s seen since He’s Just Not That Into You came out. Jenny stays quiet.

"This is even better than finding the goddamn Punisher," the one with the Starbucks smile says. "We got his woman."

Jenny proceeds to amaze herself by not rolling her eyes. This is ridiculous, she thinks, she  _ is _ in a cheesy cop show and this is the worst dialogue she's ever heard.

"Let's get her out of here," the one holding her hair says, and she hates the sound of him, hates the way his fingers dance over her wrist, almost a caress. "Before he gets back."

Panic bursts through the anger. If he comes back and finds her gone, he isn't going to come looking for her. It's one thing to save her life when he thought she had a loving husband waiting for her at home and that she was suicidal, it's another thing entirely to risk his life for someone not interested in saving their own and with no one that would even notice she was gone. For another thing, she's made such a shitfest about taking care of herself, he'd probably just think she went home on her own like a dumbass.

"Definitely," the pervy one says, reaching for her thigh again. She bares her teeth and snarls, kicking out at him, catching his shin instead of his junk like she was was hoping. He grunts, stumbling backwards while the others laugh again.

Except the one in front of her. He looks at her consideringly, head tilted slightly and says, "We don't have to take you with us, sweetheart. We could do you right here, leave a body for him to find." Jenny goes still at that. He pulls a gun smoothly from an inner pocket, smiles at her a polite Starbucks smile, and points it at her face. "We'd have to mess you up first, make sure he knows you suffered before you died. That you begged and cried and called for him. That works for me. What do you think?"

Terror and rage battle in her chest. Jenny pants with it, feels her knees shake like a bad cliché. She's choking back tears and hyperventilating at the same time, her vision doubling so that she has to blink at the gun when she says, "Suck my dick."

He laughs a little, like she's told a joke, before he smacks her in the face with the gun.  _ Pistol-whipped, _ her mind supplies helpfully. It's only because the guy behind her has let go of her hair and has her by the arms that she manages to keep her feet. Man does it hurt to be pistol-whipped, like really  _ really  _ hurts, because Jenny's had some real doozies in her day but  _ this _ , this is fucking up there.

"You've got a real mouth on you," Starbucks guy says, still smiling pleasantly at her like she's a mocha-shaka-laka-something-chino. “I can see why he likes you.” He turns that creepy-ass smile on the pervy guy and says, “Why don’t you get yourself a piece?”

Jenny doesn’t scream, but it’s a close thing. The terror is beating the crap out of the anger right now, but she bites hard against his hand when he covers her mouth with it, tears through skin and gets a nice chunk of something in her mouth that she spits at him with more than a little sick satisfaction.

“You crazy bitch!” he says with disbelief, staring wide-eyed at her, clutching his hand to his chest. Someone backhands her, and she can't tell anymore who's blood she's tasting. The guy holding her arms shoves her forward, and she hits the concrete face down. God her head  _ hurts _ . Her torn stitches are a hazy dizzying pain that she feels thrumming through her entire body.

“I’ll kill you,” she hisses, a hoarse imitation of a scream. “I’ll rip your fucking head off, I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you!”

They’re laughing again, hands on her, exclaiming when they reveal her bare ass under the t-shirt, touching her, laughing when she tries to buck under them, cursing when two gunshots ring one right after the other, so loud and so close to her head that her ears start ringing again.

Something hot splashes across half her face and neck, and the grip on her arms disappears. Everything is still, silent, and she wonders again if she’s gone deaf. She lifts her head a little, fights a wave of dizziness to turn and look towards the door. The bored guy is crumpled with his head facing the wrong way, and Frank Castle is pointing a big ass gun that looks like it’s as easy to shoot as the cheesy police shows make it look at the guy with the Starbucks smile.

“Step away from the girl,” he says, another stupid line of dialogue, but Starbucks doesn’t seem phased by the fact that all three of his buddies are dead.

He reaches for her instead, gets her by the hair again and hauls her up to her feet, which slip and slide against the pool of blood on the concrete. Her head hurts, his grip in her hair hurts, her torn stitches hurt, but she swallows the pained cry and clenches her teeth, blinking through tears - oh God, she’s  _ crying? _ \- to look at Frank. Something cold and hard presses against her temple.

“How about you put that gun down and take a few steps back, or I empty a clip in her head?”

Frank looks at him like he’s surprised he’s capable of speech, then looks at Jenny like he’s expecting her to translate.

“I said let her go.”

“You’re not listening to me. Let me break this down for you,” Starbucks says, shaking her a little in his grip. “Gun,” he says, emphasizing by pressing it harder into her aching head. “Hostage,” he shakes her again, and oh man she wants to hurl all over his ugly ass loafers.

The third shot is closer to her head than the other two had been, and this time there’s a hoarse gurgling sound behind her instead of deafening silence. Jenny stumbles, ends up on her knees, then turns to look over her shoulder at the guy. He’s clawing at a hole in his throat, blood pouring like syrup over his hands and soaking into the collar of his nice shirt. His clawing slows down, his eyes glaze over, and then he stops. Everything shudders once and never moves again.

Jenny has never watched someone die before. This is what she’s thinking when the Punisher kneels next to her, puts his hands on her shoulders and waits for her to look at him.

It isn’t easy, tearing her eyes away from the body. A few seconds ago, a man, he had a name and a face and she hated him with every fibre of her being. Now he’s just a body. She stares at Frank, watches his sunken eyes take in her face. “Let me see,” he says, not asking if she’s alright or, God forbid, if they hurt her. He touches her chin gently, tilts her face a little and looks at what must be an impressive shiner she can feel hot and throbbing from being  _ pistol-whipped. _

Fucking  _ pistol-whipped. _

“Stitches?” he asks, and she blinks, a little slow, before realizing he’s asking about her stitches.

“You’re gonna have to redo them,” she says, slurring her words a little.

His brow draws down at that, but he doesn’t say anything else. He stands up and starts gathering the few remaining items not already packed away into the duffel bag. He slings it over his shoulder, then comes back to Jenny and puts her shoes down in front of her. She blinks at them, a little confused. He leans down again and holds her by the arms, guiding her to stand. She sways dangerously, staring at his face as he watches her.

When he’s satisfied she’s going to stay up on her own, he leans back down and picks up an ankle. She automatically reaches for his shoulder for balance, not certain she isn’t going to fall over anyway. He puts her shoes on her, like she’s a child or an invalid or like she’s been pistol-whipped and that’s made her stupid for some reason, then rises again and takes her by the hand.

She only manages to walk behind him for a few steps before she stumbles into him, her feet not really moving where they’re supposed to and her side burning up so she can’t even see straight.

“S’rry,” she slurs, tongue feeling too big for her mouth, “’m s’rry.”

He doesn’t say anything, just scoops her up bridal style and carries her at a brisk pace like she weighs nothing.

Jenny stares up into the night sky, wondering why it’s swaying.  _ Frank Castle is carrying you through Hell’s Kitchen _ , says Helpful Mind. She thinks she might be sick. It’s freezing. She’s pretty sure her bare ass is hanging out, buffeted by the chill. Her socks are wet. There's blood drying in her hair and on her face. Frank is warm everywhere he touches her, and super hard-muscled, not even breathing heavy. She turns her head a little and looks at him. He doesn’t look like he’s noticed that he’s carrying a one hundred twenty-four and a half pound woman.

He looks scared, and miserable, and so sad it makes her chest hurt.

She closes her eyes.

* * *

 

For the second time in as many days, Jenny comes to with no idea where the hell she is. Her head feels like Lars Ulrich’s bass drum. Her eyes are scratchy and dry as she blinks them against a bare hanging bulb.

“Jenny?”

She doesn’t have to turn her head this time, he shows up all on his own, face drawn and kind of pale. “Frank?”

“Good,” he says, and he seems to deflate, standing up and disappearing from her field of vision. She hears his boots stomping around, sounds like more concrete, then he’s beside her again with something cold and soothing to press against her head. She leans into it. “The safe house was compromised.”

“You think?”

He purses his lips, a thin line of disapproval. “I’m sorry,” he says finally, and he looks like he has no idea what else to say.

Jenny wants to be angry at him, she really does. He picked her up off the diner floor when she was glad to be done with it, got under her skin and brought up ancient history, then she almost got…

“I don’t feel good,” she says, suddenly aware of the nausea rushing up her throat. She tries to sit up, but he puts a hand on her shoulder and rolls her to the side. She hurls right into the bucket, thank God, that he holds up to her, the sick splashing echo making her groan. She hurls and hurls and hurls, eventually just bile and stomach acid because aside from that rice, she really hadn’t had much in the past couple of days besides water, and yup, there it goes.

When she’s finally done, he wipes her face with a damp washcloth. She hates this. She hates herself.

“Why are you doing this?” she asks him finally, staring at the dog tags that slide across his big-ass black t-shirt stretched tight across his big-ass chest muscles. He pauses, and for a long time she thinks he’s not going to answer her.

“I’ll be right back,” he says finally, disappearing with the bucket, making splashing noises and making stuff rattle, then comes back with slow measured steps. He sits on a stool beside her. She thinks she’s in a bed this time, or that there might be another mattress under this one, because she feels bed-height to him, with his fingers linked loosely and hanging between his legs.

“This is my fault,” he says finally, eyes intent on his feet. “I was supposed to keep you safe from yourself, not throw you into shit you got nothing to do with.”

He’s making that miserable face again, that unhappy brow thing with the lip pursing and like maybe someone kicked his puppy or something.

But Jenny is babbling in her own mind, she knows that. All she can think about is the fact that she’s been on her own for so long, that aside from a handful of one night stands no one’s even  _ touched _ her since Daniel died, that things like casual touches and hugs are things she’s been kind of starving for, and she wishes she had been awake when he had his hands on her to stitch her up. She thinks that’s sick, she thinks he’s the goddamn Punisher, not a brand new bestie, but she thinks that for the first time since Daniel died she’s awake, alive, and it’s horrifying, terrifying.

She doesn’t want to be alive. Not in this fucked up world where men can do this to her, gun her down, push her into the dirt and make her suffer, laugh at her threats, make her hurt. She's done hurting. She doesn't want to live like this anymore.

_ She doesn’t want to live like this anymore _ .

“Will you teach me?” she says, voice all steady and breathless like she’s about to drop some serious ass wisdom on him right now.

Frank’s brow furrows in confusion. “What?”

“Will you teach me how to keep myself safe? I can’t…”  _ they were going to hurt me _ , “I can’t go through that again. That feeling, like I’m just…”  _ nothing, a bug in the mud, worse than useless,  _ “a victim. I don’t wanna be a victim.”  _ I don’t wanna be a victim. _

His brow unfurrows. He looks at Jenny as though seeing her for the first time, his eyes calculating, reevaluating, for long silent moments before he apparently comes to a conclusion and says, “Yeah. Okay.”

And that’s how Jenny gave up the rest of her life and took up with the Punisher.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Situations that make us feel powerless can ruin the rest of our lives, long after they're over. Please get help.


	4. Swallowed

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Does it hurt?” he asks, voice low and measured.
> 
> “Yes.”
> 
> “Good,” he says. “Pain leads to calluses, calluses lead to hardness. Hardness protects you, keeps you going longer, hurts the other guy.”

“There’s three basic parts to every gun,” he says, laying them out on the table.

Jenny stares at them. She doesn’t think she’s ever seen a gun up close before.

“You ever shoot one of these before?”

“No,” she says, reaching out to touch the dark textured handle of one.

“Hey, eyes on me,” he says, and she lifts her head to look at him. He looks like he’s dying for an excuse to send her packing.

“Three parts to every gun,” she prompts, and he purses his lips like he wants to say something. Instead, he picks up a handgun.

“Action. Stock. Barrel.” He points them out as he names them. “This is a SIG Sauer P228,” he shows her the gun from the side. “It’s light, with a short barrel. Better for recoil. Hardly jams.” He does something, and the clip falls into his hand. “It carries thirteen rounds with a standard clip, but I’ve modified this one to carry fifteen. Here,” he holds it out to her, clip still in his hand.

Jenny reaches out for it, grips it like she thinks she’s supposed to. It’s heavier than she thought it would be, solid, hard, something she can really squeeze in a reassuring kind of way. Frank grunts and she looks up, confused.

“You’re left-handed,” he says, looking kind of pleased.

“Yeah.”

“Good. That’s good. It gives you an element of surprise.”

Jenny tries resting her finger on the trigger. It’s a stretch. “This is a little uncomfortable,” she says, showing him. Frank nods. “I think my hands are too small for this gun.”

“They are. But you have little hands, and I don’t want you getting babied by a bitty gun with no firing power. You learn on this one, and then everything else after that feels easy.”

“Okay.”

He spends days with her like this, talking endlessly about guns, showing her how to take them apart and put them back together again, pointing out important shit like the _firing pin_ and the _hammer_ and the _safety._ She still hears ringing in her ears, and her left eye gets teary if she concentrates for too long, but she swallows it up.

He won’t let her shoot until the stitches come out and the headache is completely gone. That's when he starts in on her arms.

“You’ve got scrawny arms. No muscle.” He demonstrates by gripping a point above her elbow that makes her drop the SIG neatly into his palm. “This is gonna recoil. Your little stick arms aren’t gonna be able to handle it, you’ll hit yourself in the face with your own damn gun.”

Jenny glares at him. “Gee, thanks.”

“We need to get you in shape,” he says, almost to himself. Jenny raises her eyebrow at this, but only really starts to worry when he starts asking if she’s ever done a pull-up and how many pushups does she think she can do.

“Look,” she says finally, “I know I’m no skinny bitch. I mean, I have no thigh gap and I don’t eat celery. I jiggle when I walk. I’m what my ma used to call a _generously curved_ woman.” Frank’s face, inches from her wrist which he has in a vice grip in an attempt to show her how to carry weight better, turns red.

“I don’t want you to be a _skinny bitch_ ,” he mutters, fingers tightening around her wrist. “I want you to be _stronger_.”

“Stronger,” she repeats, and for a while she’s not even sure what he means.

“You think every time something happens, you’re gonna have a gun around? You didn’t last time.” She swallows at that, because she can’t think about that, she can’t remember the way their hands felt on her-

“So you’re gonna teach me how to fight?”

“Hand-to-hand combat.”

“Like the military?”

Frank goes quiet at that, his grip flinching against her wrist. “Yeah, like the military. You need to keep your wrist locked or it’s gonna hurt like a mother when that thing goes off. I’ll get the wrap.”

He teaches her how to tie her hands, wrap her wrists. He shows her how to make a fist.

The whole time, Jenny sits at the table, and Frank unleashes a torrent of information about every weapon in his arsenal, every portion and component of every gun, the mechanics of it, how to tell them apart, the kind of ammunition they use, what’s better for close range or long range, what kind of noise she should expect them to make, how long they take to reload, how fast she can fire them, how many bullets they can carry, and how many bullets it takes them to kill a man.

He shows her his knives, too, but they make her nervous and she fumbles one too soon after being handed it, so he sweeps them away back into the duffel bag with a frown, looking like he’s already sorry he’s doing this.

The next time he brings up her weight, she frowns but doesn’t argue. He isn’t trying to get her to be _pretty_ for him, it isn’t a sex issue at all. Frank is a gentleman, he turns around every time she undresses to change, or comes out of the shower in a towel. She herself hasn’t offered him the same courtesy, has covertly ogled him every chance she’s gotten. He’s twice as wide as she is, but every ounce of it is hard corded muscle under a web of scar tissue. Jenny has always liked herself like this, soft everywhere, a generous handful. Daniel had loved her body.

But Frank wants her to be strong.

“We’ll work on it when you’re recuperated,” he says every time she asks. But he doesn’t let her eat less. If anything, he feeds her more. “You’ll need the extra mass when we start,” he says when she complains that this is counterintuitive.

She waits.

Almost two weeks later, he finally throws her some mismatched sweats and says, “Come on, we’re gonna start training.”

* * *

 

“Ground rules,” Frank says, his stance all military, hands folded behind his back and shoulders straight, legs shoulder-width apart, feet out.

“Yeah.” Jenny tries to correct her posture, but she’s never had great posture, too busy worrying about other shit like not starving to death and where to get her next drink from. She’s swimming in the stuff Frank got her, who knows where, but it’s too small to be his while still being too large to fit her. The sweatshirt she’s wearing says “I heart NYC”, and the sweatpants say “NYU”. Both her sleeves and the pant legs are rolled up, drawstring on the pants gone as tight as she can make it. She’s totally commando underneath. Oh yeah, she’s definitely ready to go.

“ _Yes,_ ” he corrects. “I need to know you’re paying attention.”

“Yes,” she says, but rolls her eyes.

He frowns. “Yes, what?”

“Come on,” she squints at him, but he doesn’t look like he’s kidding. “Yes, _Sir_ ,” she mutters. He cracks a smile at that. Bastard.

“You need muscle definition.” Jenny keeps her lips pursed, and he smiles a little at that, too.

“How do I get muscle definition?”

“Training,” he says, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “Lots of training.” His eyes do that thing, that flicker over her whole body that makes her feel like he’s seeing stats floating in the air beside her. “And for training to work, you need to understand and follow the rules.”

“What are the rules?”

“Number one, you start when I say, you stop when I say. I need you to go as far as I can push you, but I don’t need you pushing yourself too hard and hurting yourself. Understood?”

“Yeah.” He raises an eyebrow. “Yes, Sir,” she throws in another eyeroll.

“Number two, no drinking, no smoking, no drugs.”

That one’s easy. “Yes, Sir.”

“Number three,  it gets to be too much, I push past your limits, you tap out _immediately_.”

“Jesus, what the hell are you planning on doing to me?”

“And number four,” he says, smiling a little more, a glint in his eye that leaves her a little uncomfortable, “always be alert, expect an attack at any time. There’s no such thing as ‘off the clock’ for this, not unless you’ve tapped out. _Always be alert_.”

“Yes, Sir,” she mutters, feeling entirely out of her depth.

“First I need to gauge where you are before we decide how to get to where we want.” He tosses her the wrap, watches as she wraps her hands the way he taught her - over every finger, around the thumb, down to the wrist - then nods and holds up his palms. “Punch until you can’t punch anymore.”

She hesitates. “Your bare hands?”

“Scared you’re gonna hurt me?” His smile is frightening, so she shrugs and pretends not to care.

“Fine.”

She steps forward and punches the way she thinks she’s supposed to. She makes the right fist, thumb on the outside, wrist straight.

“Cross,” he says after a few hits. “Use your hips, put your weight behind into it.”

She tries it. The punches make loud, satisfying smacks against his skin. His palms turn red.

She pauses. “Hey, you sure you don’t-?”

“What’s the first rule?”

“What?”

“The first rule. You start when I say, you stop when I say. Did I tell you to stop?”

She glares at him, that all familiar anger coursing up into her shoulders and fueling a few vicious jabs. He smiles, just a display of teeth.

“Good.”

She keeps punching. It feels like hours by the time she realizes she’s panting, breathing heavily, barely able to lift her arms anymore. They hurt, everything feels sore. Her elbows and shoulders are agony. The skin of her knuckles feels hot and raw.

“Does it hurt?” he asks, voice low and measured.

Jenny doesn't stop punching. “Yes.”

“Good,” he says again. “Pain leads to calluses, calluses lead to hardness. Hardness protects you, keeps you going longer, hurts the other guy.”

She keeps punching. Her shoulders burn.

“You hearing me, girl?”

“Yes, Sir.”

“Good.”

 


	5. Spiral

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The creak of boots and weaponry let her know he's still there, right behind her. She wonders when that started feeling like a comfort, and wildly imagines for a moment how easy it would be for him to put that SIG to the back of her head right now and squeeze.

The next day, she can't lift her arms. Frank stands in front of her chair and vigorously rubs them from shoulders to fingertips. He shows her the cracked skin and blisters on her knuckles, and he smiles and says, “Good.”

Then he makes her jump. As high as she can, legs folding up to her chest, for as long as she can. They give out a lot faster than her arms do.

She has no idea why he makes her do half the things he makes her do. Why he makes her eat with a weight in her lap, or balance on her toes, or rap her knuckles against the tiles in the shower whenever she's in there.

Other stuff, she gets. Lifts and squats and more endless cycles of punching, jumping, pushing against his massive bulk as he bears down on her weights. Once in awhile, she'll do something right and he'll show his teeth and say, “Good.”

She starts to feel like she lives for that word.

When he's not telling her everything wrong with the way she punches, he's teaching her how to dodge a hit. “If you can come out of it without taking damage, that's a win. If you can achieve objective with minimal damage, that's a win. If you get out alive, without having achieved objective, that's a win, because it means you can come back stronger and smarter next time and get it done.”

He isn't kidding about the whole 'always be alert’ thing either. Jenny is ambushed frequently, while she's eating, while she's sleeping, and he expects her to dodge every time, counter and weave, not get knocked on her ass with the remains of her burrito in her lap.

“When do I learn how to hit _you_?” she snarls one time, still tangled in the scratchy blanket on the floor with her legs in the air.

“When I think you're ready,” he says, already making his way back to his pallet on the other side of the room.

One day, weeks later, he stops her from unwrapping her hands, still panting from exertion with a thin sheen of sweat that shines under the bare bulb, and says, “Put your shoes on.”

Jenny freezes, staring at his back as he starts arming himself, double checking ammo and counting his knives.

Frank has gone out a handful of times since they've moved to this safehouse. It's a basement, concrete walls with heavy cracks and the sound of a train outside that shakes the light bulb. There are no windows, just some cheap ventilation and the unbroken night of the light either being on or off. It's not as big as the warehouse, but the water pressure is better.

Jenny hasn't been outside since waking up here.

She moves quickly, suddenly claustrophobic. She slips her shoes on, tightens the wrap on her left hand, and pulls on Frank's heavy canvas jacket.

He looks at her, weighing and measuring. At the door he pauses.

“You go where I point, you do what I say. No talking back, no hesitation. You understand me?”

“Yes, Sir.”

He stares at her a little longer, then, like he knows she's holding her breath for it, he says, “Good.”

When the door opens, the hallway outside is dark. A small dim light from around the corner illuminates a staircase, cracked and ageing concrete, covered in questionable stains. They climb silently, and emerge in an icy breeze off the Hudson. Frank has a truck parked outside, which surprises her. She doesn't remember him ever driving her anywhere before, but then again she was pretty out of it both times.

“Get in,” he says, pulling on gloves.

She gets into the passenger seat silently, buckles her seatbelt. He snorts at that, but doesn't say anything as he starts the car and pulls onto a dinky street. The truck is a heap, crackling and clanging and whining. She thinks anyone within miles would hear them coming. She doesn't say anything.

Eventually, Frank stops at an old building. It's badly damaged, one of the buildings that got taken out the day aliens fell out of the sky from the looks of it. The building next to it is one of those gentrified new condos that popped up from the rubble of the city. It feels odd to think now that this is what the city wants Hell's Kitchen to be. Shiny, new, not rent controlled.

Instead of leading her to the new building, Frank picks his way through the rubble of the wrecked one. She's nervous, stepping through what should not be standing, but Frank walks like he's been here before, knows exactly where he's going.

He pushes a fallen door out of the way and reveals the stairwell, half exposed to the night sky. “Go on,” he gestures, a little bit of challenge in his eyes.

Jenny shies away from the look, but climbs the stairs without hesitating. There are some steps missing, and too many walls with holes in them where she can get a good look at just how high up she's gotten, look down and see the ruins of the building she's climbing. When she hesitates, she can feel Frank's eyes on her back, like a physical touch. It makes her go on.

The creak of boots and weaponry let her know he's still there, right behind her. She wonders when that started feeling like a comfort, and wildly imagines for a moment how easy it would be for him to put that SIG to the back of her head right now and squeeze. No one would ever find her here, she doesn't think, maybe not until someone tears down the building to put up something new.

But she knows he wouldn't do that. She knows he's protecting her, teaching her to protect herself.

Finally, there are no more stairs to climb. They're standing on what's left of the roof, twelve stories up. The wind whips through the canvas jacket like it's nothing, and Jenny wraps her arms around herself and shivers.

Frank immediately heads to a spot on the edge of the roof, hands her the case of his bolt-action M24 rifle.

Jenny assembles it carefully, not very fast, but comfortable enough with the parts now to feel the rightness of the pieces coming together. The gunmetal feels solid, real, a comfort in the open black sky where she feels exposed and unsafe after so long underground.

Frank lays down on his stomach with a pair of binoculars, looks intently towards the new building, shoulders low. She lays down beside him, waits for instructions. They're facing the side of the building, she sees, a wall of windows, some lit, most not, and a myriad lives that seem impossibly far removed from the two of them.

Eventually, Frank looks up at her, then jerks his chin towards the building. “Take a look,” he says. Jenny puts her eye to the scope, snaps the lens cover open. The world jumps into focus.

“Two down, three from the left,” he instructs. She orients herself, finds the window. It's a living room, she thinks, she can see the side of a television and a couch, and two people sitting on it, sharing popcorn or something. A man and a woman.

“Who are they?” she asks, voice soft. She knows they can't hear her no matter how close they look right now, but it seems like a night for hushed voices.

“He's some nobody from the DA office. He likes picking up girls, street girls. The younger the better. He likes hurting them. Last month he killed a girl. Strangled her with a lamp cord. She was fifteen.”

Jenny inhales sharply.

“That's his wife. She has no idea.”

She swallows a lump in her throat.

“When I give the word, you're gonna take him out.”

“Yes, Sir.”

For a long time, there is only silence. Whether consciously or unconsciously, Jenny has synced her breathing to Frank's, a slow steady thing he had described to her as the calm before the storm. They watch the sadistic murderer and his wife, laughing at something they're watching on TV. They run out of popcorn, and with a sweet peck on the lips, the wife gets up and walks into the kitchen.

The piece of shit watches her walk away, the back of his head wide and dark and in perfect view.

“Now.” Frank's voice is low and quiet, almost a whisper.

Jenny exhales, adjusts for wind resistance, and squeezes the trigger.

It's a silent thing, just a _whoosh_ sound, and the scope jumps a little, like it doesn't want her to see the moment of actual impact. When she brings it back to the window, the front of his brain is splashed across the couch. The wife is screaming, a faint faraway thing she can't hear over the wind.

Frank clicks the scope shut and the window disappears.

When she looks at him, she can't tell what he's thinking. He's staring at her like he's never seen her before, like he's again questioning teaching her anything.

For once, Jenny doesn't shy away from his gaze, that intensity that makes her breathe heavy. Her heart is racing like she's been jumping for hours. She doesn't look away.

“Pack it up before the cops get here,” he says quietly.

Silently, obediently, she dismantles the rifle and packs it into its bag, picks up her casing, lifts it all onto her shoulder and leads the way back down the stairs.

They don't speak for the whole way back to the basement, even when they're inside. Jenny finally unwraps her hands, stares at them like they should look any different. They're shaking a little, and she's absurdly glad they didn't shake when she was aiming a sniper rifle at that bastard's head.

Frank rifles through his duffel, then sits down at the sad little table they eat their meals on and shows her a bottle of Jim Beam. He puts two glasses down on the table, pours into one. Jenny stares at him.

“Have a drink,” he says, holding the glass out to her.

Jenny takes it like it’s a live adder, gingerly, with the tips of her fingers. She can smell it, feel the weight of it slosh around in her hand. There's at least four fingers in here, enough to really soften the edges off someone.

“No, thank you,” she says, putting the glass down on the table.

He frowns, pausing while pouring out his own drink. “Come on. I know what I said about the rules, but the one drink won’t hurt. And you could use it.”

Boy could she ever. “Thanks, but no thanks.”

He stares at her, that intense piercing gaze from the rooftop. “Why not?”

“I don’t want to,” she lies, turns around so he doesn’t see the lie written all over her face, and walks back to the rickety old table where she first learned what makes a gun work. She doesn’t sit like he does, doesn’t like to sit while she does this. She picks up the SIG that's become more hers than his, and it feels good and right in her hand. It's still too big, her fingers are still too short, but it is warm and familiar in a way she needs right now. Quickly, efficiently, she field strips the gun, pulls it apart. She lines up the pieces, counts them off in her head, _muzzle, breach, hammer, trigger_ , then picks them back up and puts them together again. Her hands shake. The firing pin keeps slipping from her fingers.

She can hear him approach, but her skin is clammy and she feels sweat prickle at the back of her neck. She doesn’t want to look at him, doesn’t want him to see her right now.

“You’re an alcoholic,” he says quietly, not accusatory, but a little… hurt?

She stills, places her fingertips against the tabletop. “Three and a half years sober.”

“I didn’t know,” he says, again sounding hurt, and she turns around to look at him finally. He’s enormous, towers over her, his massive bulk dwarfing her by comparison. But he looks like a child caught pretending to be an adult.

“It’s okay,” she says, aiming for casual. “No big deal.”

He rubs the back of his hand against his upper lip. She glances behind him, two glasses untouched sitting on the table. “I don’t know anything about you at all, do I? I mean, I know you’re strong, you’re smart, you’re scary fast and pick things up in hours. I just loaded you like a weapon and shot you at a man, but I don’t know anything about you.”

She stares at his dog tags so she doesn’t have to look at his face. She knows this part. She’s supposed to ask what he wants to know, open up, and they’re supposed to learn things about one another, become friends or partners or whatever.

The thought terrifies her.

“I told you when Daniel found me I was dying of alcohol poisoning.” He nods slowly. His face becomes shadowed. “He helped me get into a program. I got sober. It’s no big deal.”

Jenny turns back to the gun, laid out in pieces on the table. _Action, stock, barrel_ , she recites to herself. The pieces that make up every gun in the world. _Body_ _, mind, soul._

“You’re real quiet,” Frank says, no longer behind her, standing beside her at the table.

“You’re one to talk,” she says, smiling a little to take the sting out of it.

“No I mean you don’t make any sound when you’re hurt. Even when I was digging a bullet out of your gut, and when those guys were wailing on you, you were breathing heavy and you were crying, but you didn’t make a sound. Most men couldn't do the same.” He reaches for the hammer, fingers fluttering, then reassembles the weapon faster than she can keep up with.

“I was…” she trails off, watching Frank’s thick fingers pull apart the gun again, elegant and graceful in this despite how often he seems to have no idea what to do with them. Jenny loves his hands, she thinks suddenly. They've touched her a lot over the past few weeks, adjusted her grip or corrected her stance, strengthened her knuckles by hurting them first, and she knows them better than she knows herself. She stares at them, mesmerised. “I was taught not to make noise.”

“Yeah?” Like he knows they're distracting her, Frank puts his hands behind his back, a silent invitation for Jenny to try this time. She reaches for the barrel first, like he did. “Not even the military can get its guys to keep quiet when they’re hurt bad enough. Who taught you?”

“My first husband,” she says, only paying attention to the conversation with half her mind as she frowns at the slide, which refuses to cooperate for her the way it did for Frank. “He liked me seen and not heard.” The slide finally obeys her fingers and she makes a triumphant sound. Frank stiffens.

“First husband, huh? So Daniel was your second husband.”

“That’s me, once divorced, once widowed, ahead of the curve.” She begins pulling apart the gun again.

“And this first husband, he liked to, what, rough you up? Bounce you off the walls?”

Jenny loses her grip on the slide. It snicks against her index finger, and she automatically swallows the cry that would have accompanied it. She puts the gun down slowly on the table, lets Frank hold her finger and inspect the cut. It’s bleeding.

“Just a scratch, you’re fine.” She nods, appreciating that he hasn’t decided she needs to be handled with kid gloves. "What happened to him?"

“It doesn’t matter, he’s gone now,” she says darkly.

“Where is he? Dead?”

“No. Rikers, I guess.”

“You _guess_?”

Jenny yanks her hand away from him, cradles it to her chest. That anger rears up in her, hisses in her throat. “He doesn’t exactly send me Christmas cards and I haven’t really sent him a change of address notice either.”

Frank goes quiet, but his jaw is clenched, and he holds his hands behind his back, all rigid military formality. He’s either very angry, or very uncomfortable. Either option makes her heart race.

“Look, he went away for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. I divorced him right after. I haven’t kept tabs on him, and we haven’t spoken since before he got arrested.”

“What’s his name?”

Jenny swallows. She could be stubborn about this, could refuse to share anymore, but Frank’s entire body is radiating a weary endless patience that she doesn’t think she could go up against right now. “Tim,” she says finally, and it’s been years since she last spoke his name. “Tim Buccato.”

“Good.” She relaxes minutely. “One more thing.” He has his jaw clenched, shoved out at her like a weapon, and her heart races again. “Aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. Was he coming after you?”

Jenny is silent too long to be able to lie, but she can't bring herself to say it, either. She thinks about the hospital, the white scars across her stomach. She looks away.

“Okay,” he says, voice soft and frightening. Jenny goes back to staring at his dog tags. “Your grip is sloppy. You need four fingers on the slide at all times, don’t half ass it with two just because there's a grip on this one.”

“Yes, Sir.”

“Do it again.”

Jenny turns back to the table and does it again.


	6. Home

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Frank exudes a kind of invincibility to her, an unstoppable force of a man rolling through Hell’s Kitchen, which had inexplicably stopped and picked her up when she’d been dying on the floor. But she’s landed a few hits on him when they spar, and he bruises and bleeds just like she does. The massive breadth of him, that hard muscle that’s pinned her down until she tapped out just a few days ago is human and vulnerable and she’s faced with it for the first time since…
> 
> ...whatever the hell this is.

They start sparring the next day.

Jenny gets the snot beaten out of her.

She doesn't tap out though, and Frank looks almost proud when he calls it quits. He seats her at the table and takes a look at her bruises, thumb and forefinger digging into her chin so he can turn her head from side to side.

“I really got you good, huh?” he looks a little guilty, touching his fingertips to the edge of a bruise on her cheek. She winces, but smiles tiredly.

He smiles back, a small but genuine smile, so Jenny picks this exact moment to say, “I need clothes, Frank. I can't move right in these.”

Frank blinks a little, surprised. “You wanna go _shopping_?” He sounds mocking now. “Yeah why not, let's get soft ice cream at Coney Island, make a day of it.”

She frowns, reaches up and grabs his wrist. His thumb digs a little into the skin in response. “I don't know how to tell you this, man, but I have boobs. I need a _bra_.”

Predictably, Frank blushes, releases her chin like she bit him. She lets go of his wrist, leans back a little to give him some space. This is obviously something that's never occurred to him, and Jenny thinks he must be the most oblivious man in existence. He genuinely looks surprised she even _has_ boobs, never mind they all but bounce off her chin whenever he makes her jump, and they fucking hurt.

“You're really hurting my feelings here, Frank,” she narrows her eyes at him.

“What?”

She rolls her eyes at his confusion. “Never mind. Look, either let me go home, grab my savings, pack some essentials, or we break into a sporting goods store, because honestly, I could use a jacket and maybe some real shoes to go with all the bras I’m gonna be wearing.”

He's quiet for awhile, and Jenny can't tell what he's thinking.

“You never needed my permission to go home,” he says. “Or anywhere else for that matter. You're not a prisoner, Jenny.”

“I know,” she says quickly, voice going softer in a traitorous way that she can't confront right now. Not that she needs to worry about that with the world's densest man. “There's nothing there for me to go back to. Except bras.”

He blushes harder at that, stands up and nods. “Fine. We'll swing by tomorrow.”

Jenny's heart keeps racing for a long time after they've turned off the light, unnaturally aware of Frank's breathing on his cot on the other side of the room. She presses her fingers into the bruise on her cheek, sees clearly the moment of panic on his face when he realised she wasn't going to be able to dodge it in time and his wrapped fist landed heavily against her. She had seen stars, and still felt his hands on her cheeks, heard him call her name, voice full of concern and…

Jenny thinks she's probably more fucked up than she's given herself credit for being.

Because she can’t sleep, she can’t even close her eyes, listening for that sound that’s become home to her, even though she hasn’t had a home in years. And she’s lived on the streets long enough to know she needs this, needs a home, and that means that she needs _Frank._ She’s taken to calling him by his name without irony, but she can’t believe she’s ever let herself forget who he is. Frank Castle. The Punisher. Mass murderer. Wanted by every law enforcement agency from here to Jersey.

Just Frank, the man who stitched her up - _twice_ \- and taught her to be strong, to stand up and hit hard, to keep hitting through the pain because the pain makes her harder, and hardness makes her keep going longer, hurts the other guy.

Frank, who lives in a closed box with her, eats, sleeps, trains with her every single day, but failed to even notice she’s a _girl._

Just Frank.

Yeah. She’s definitely fucked up.

 

* * *

 

Frank looks miserable in her apartment. He stays by the door, probably being a gentleman again or terrified of accidentally seeing her girly unmentionables or something, but it's a studio apartment and it's really not big enough for privacy. He's massive in it, larger than life. He hunches his shoulders like he knows it, too.

Jenny is stuffing underwear and clean clothes she thinks are suitable for the new life she’s living into a duffel bag. Being in her apartment again, seeing dresses and skirts hanging in her closet alongside her spare diner uniform, that ugly shiny red thing she put on almost every day for two years, is like sorting through the life of a stranger. She’s trying to remember where she's kept her only pair of boots, when Frank says, “You don't have any pictures.”

“Pictures are for memories,” she says, very carefully not looking at him.

“So you just don't have any memories you wanna keep?”

She does look at him them, and it makes him look away for once, around him at the walls and the floors and the ratty furniture. He doesn't say anything, but she can practically hear the disapproval in the thin set of his lips and his clenched jaw.

Her apartment is a shit hole. The walls are paper thin, and there are mold stains on the ceiling she used to stare at during all those sleepless nights alone. What's worse, she doesn't think she's ever once cleaned it up or tried to make it look nice. Her crap is everywhere, and there's nothing in her fridge besides takeout leftovers. It had never mattered to her. She'd never looked around at it and seen the disaster of her life, really  _seen_ just how much she'd given up. She had barely even looked at it before she rented it, because it hadn't mattered to her what it looked like, because she had just wanted to be someplace where she couldn't _smell_ Daniel anymore.

She definitely can't smell him now.

“I need to take a shower. Like, a regular human shower. Sit down, take a load off. I'll be ten minutes.”

He looks like he wants to argue, but she gathers a change of clothes quickly and steps into the tiny bathroom, hesitating before locking the door.

She looks at herself in the mirror over the sink for a long time before she reaches into the medicine cabinet for her big ass scissors. Unraveling her messy bun, she drapes her hair in sections, then cuts it above the shoulder. She doesn't think about it, doesn't linger over long strands of dark hair curling around her fingers, just clumps everything together and tosses it into the trashcan, shoving the nasty ass sweatshirt she hasn't been able to change out of and the sweatpants on top of it, and stepping under the spray of her shower.

She hates it. The pressure is off, doesn't feel right. She can't get the temperature she got used to in the basement. Her shampoo and body soap smell too strong to her, too girly, like rotten fruit or ripe garbage or something.

When she comes out, dressed in thick tights and a soft t-shirt she used to sleep in, and a _bra_ \- praise the _lord_ \- Frank is sitting uncomfortably stiff on her bed, staring at his boots. He looks comically out of place on her cheap floral sheets.

He looks up at her when she stands in front of him, eyes lingering on her hair, barely ear-length. “Good,” he says, but without smiling, and she feels cheated.

Trying not to think about it, she sits next to him and rolls on a thick pair of socks. “I won't need to come back here again,” she says when she's done, pulling on a dark sweatshirt. “Is there anything you think we'll need back at home base?”

He turns a little to look at her, eyes calculating. “No.”

“Okay.”

She pulls on her boots, throws on the warmest jacket she's got, slings her bag over her shoulder.

“Let's go.”

And she never goes back to the apartment again.

 

* * *

 

The day before Frank takes her out with him for the first time a couple of weeks later, they don’t train. Frank is focused, that same nervous energy that used to make her jumpy, but that now makes her feel focused too. He sits on his stool, resizing a thigh holster for her, seeming oblivious as always to the fact that he’s got his big stupid hands around her thigh, and that with her standing and him leaning forward like that, his face is at crotch-level.

“Your muscle definition’s gotten a lot better,” he says, putting the holster back on the table beside his elbow, moving a pin.

“Thanks?”

“You’ve changed,” he says then, wrapping the holster back around her thigh. He clips it, seemingly satisfied, then picks up the belt. “You’re less angry.”

She lets him wrap the belt around her waist, take it in a little, then clip it to the thigh holster. She doesn’t know how to answer him, and he doesn’t seem to be expecting an answer.

“See how that feels,” he says, and she steps back. It’s a little odd, at first. She tries some squats, then some jumps.

“It’s too tight around the thigh.”

He frowns, but as soon as she steps back in front of him he undoes everything without complaint, moving the pin in the thigh holster again.

“I never felt like I had a good enough reason to be angry. Ma died because of an aneurysm, and Daniel was just an accident. Either way, no one to get angry at.”

“And Tim?”

“I didn't _have_ to stay with him until it wasn't an option anymore.”

“You saying you deserved it just because you stayed?”

“No, of course not, it's just… whatever that is, it's not anger.”

“And whatever it is, it's gone?”

“It's just different. I'm doing something useful.”

Frank hesitates a little, eyes looking up at her through dark, thick lashes from under that unhappy brow. He doesn’t look away as he wraps the holster back around her, and she can almost imagine his fingers linger a little on the inside of her thigh. She holds his gaze while he wraps the belt back around her waist, clips everything together.

“Try that.”

She moves around, does her jumps. “Yeah, yeah that’s good.”

“Good.”

She unwraps and takes off everything herself, dropping it on the table because she isn’t sure she can take even accidentally touching him right now. He picks up his sewing kit - and she’s still not over the sight of the goddamn Punisher with a _sewing kit_ \- and works quietly while she rubs her thumb over the hammer of her SIG over and over again.

“Tell me again,” he says after a while, and a flash of annoyance races through her chest.

“We move out at o’ one-hundred, in position by o’ one-thirty.”

“Where’s position?”

“You’ll be at the back entrance, south side of the building. I’ll be in the abandoned construction across the street from the north entrance.” And boy had _that_ been a bitter pill to swallow.

“The objective is to clear out the warehouse and any stragglers on the dock. I’ll sweep in from the back, bottleneck them to you and-”

“I’ll pick them off when they try to run.”

He’s quiet at that, and Jenny looks up at him. He has that kicked-puppy look again.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” he says, lowering his head back over his work in as clear a dismissal as any.

Jenny goes back to staring at her gun. _Her_ gun. Frank outright said so, he gave it to her. A gift.

The only thing Daniel left her had been her wedding ring. There had been some money, sure, but most of what he'd made had just been given away, Daniel's unbearably kind heart unable to see a single person suffering or in need. She'd never wanted any of it anyway, and it was just more of what she'd loved about him in the first place. And it had made the ring that much more important to her. She presses her thumb into it now, inhales shakily, and focuses on the pain. It used to hurt when she first started training, crushed between her fingers when she wrapped her hands as tight as Frank taught her, bruised when she punched Frank’s hard palms. There’s a watery blister in the meat of her palm, right under the ring, that she knows she wouldn’t have if she’d just take it off.

But calluses are good, Frank had said. Calluses were hard, and hardness made her stronger.

Except when she thinks of Frank going in by himself into that building, even after he’s shown her the MP5 and outlined his strategy to her a hundred times, she doesn’t feel hard. She feels soft and squishy inside, all weak and pathetic and so so _scared._ Frank exudes a kind of invincibility to her, an unstoppable force of a man rolling through Hell’s Kitchen, which had inexplicably stopped and picked her up when she’d been dying on the floor. But she’s landed a few hits on him when they spar, and he bruises and bleeds just like she does. The massive breadth of him, that hard muscle that’s pinned her down until she tapped out just a few days ago is human and vulnerable and she’s faced with it for the first time since…

...whatever the hell this is.

“Here,” he says suddenly, standing over her with the holster and belt in his hands.

“Thanks,” she says, staring at his dog tags.

He frowns. “If you don’t wanna do this, now’s the time to tell me.”

“I wanna do this,” she says right away.

“I need your head in the game. You’re literally gonna be looking out for me. If you’re uncertain, if you’re having second thoughts-”

“I said I wanna do this.” She meets his eyes then, swallows. “I won’t let you down, Sir.”

His face softens impossibly at that. It makes the stupid squishy parts of her go funny.

“Good,” he says, voice all stupid and emotional and proud and she hates this, she hates this so much because she can’t do this anymore, not again, not like this…

“You better be goddamn careful, you hear me Frank Castle? You better not fucking die on me.” Her voice is all raw and hoarse, and she realizes with horror that she’s tearing up, like some _chick_ instead of a _warrior_ or _soldier_ like he’s trained her to be.

She drops her gaze to his hands, snatches the holster and belt from him, then pushes past him into the bathroom, unable to look back and see the undoubtedly mortified look on his face.

In the bathroom, she shakes and cries, quietly, the way she does everything else that hurts in her life. She feels like she did that night she found out Daniel was killed, that stupid rookie cop with goddamn pimples on his face, voice shaking as he delivered the news and called her _ma’am_ and it was the worst fucking night of her life. She’d locked herself into her bathroom then, too, because she still doesn’t know how to let someone see her cry without expecting them to hurt her for it.

But Frank hasn’t hurt her, he’s never hurt her. He pulls his punches when they train or spar, but he lets her feel it because he knows she can take it. He called her _strong._ He thinks she’s smart and fast, he thinks she’s a _weapon_.

She can do this, she thinks. She can be his weapon. She can protect him.

She washes her face, straps on the holster and the belt, then steps out to face him.

He’s sitting at the table with his P250, looking a little bewildered, but not meeting her eyes. She picks up her SIG, straps it into the holster, then crosses the room for the M24 in its case. She checks the scope, the barrel, the ammo, pulls on her jacket and boots and then lifts the rifle across her back.

Frank is looking at her when she looks back, suited up and ready to go, wearing the heavy canvas jacket she’d worn for most of the time she’s been with him. It looks odd on him, she thinks, after so long seeing him without it. His vest makes it bulky, the way he looked in the diner what feels like centuries ago but was really just a few short months. He looks focused, intent, the way he always does when he goes out, but this time there’s something else in his eyes, and she doesn’t recognize it at all.

“You be careful too out there,” he says, voice even more gruff than usual. “Don’t let them spot you. Stay hidden, watch the scope for reflection.”

It’s the same thing he’s said to her a thousand times already, but she nods, and it feels warm and soft in that traitorous part of her chest. “Yes, Sir.”

“Good.”

She’s sick.


	7. Grazed

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She is furious, but her voice is small and it cracks. “You’re such an ass, you know that?”
> 
> “I’ve been told worse.”
> 
> “How come you think it’s a good idea to teach me about the history of American firearm manufacturing but you can’t spare one lousy lesson to stitches?”

There’s a scaffolding draped in plastic sheets about halfway up the building, and it’s perfect. She lays down on her stomach, unpacks the rifle, and she waits. She inhales, exhales, keeps her breathing steady. The calm before the storm.

When she finally uncaps the scope, it takes her a few seconds to adjust to the darkness. It’s late, cold as ever, with a thin layer of frost clinging to the plastic sheets. They flutter wildly in an errant breeze, then settle corpse-still when the breeze dies down. She’s downwind, better for accuracy, bad for distance. But she’s close enough. 

She can barely see through the filthy warehouse windows, but she sees movement and silhouettes. She counts over a dozen shapes, and knows there are more inside that she can’t see. Her heart flips, and she has to take several deep breaths to find that calm again. When she’s settled, she checks the watch Frank gave her. Four minutes. Frank is probably in position already.

She waits.

The cold is oppressive, her ears feel like icicles. Her fingers are going stiff on the barrel and the trigger guard. The scaffolding is cold against her chest and stomach, and whenever the plastic sheets touch her face or her hands, they feel like chips of ice.

She breathes deeply, and she waits.

The first sign she gets that something has happened is raised voices. She sees some of the silhouettes scramble, then shuts her eyes tight.

When she hears the flash bomb go off, she opens her eyes again. The shadows are moving. One of them makes it out the door just as gunshots start up inside. Jenny shoots him in the neck.

She was aiming for the head, but still, a kill shot is a kill shot. 

As soon as someone realizes that there’s another shooter, panic ensues. She can hear the MP5’s _tat-tat-tat-tat_ , the sound flat and hollow like he’d told her it would be. As long as she can hear that sound, she knows he’s okay. She can almost feel him beside her, binoculars held to his eyes, watching her work. His weapon. 

Another two stumble out of the warehouse, guns held high, swinging wildly trying to find where she is. She gets one in the shoulder, the other in the chest, then goes back and shoots the first one in the face.

Two more brave the hidden sniper and the darkness outside. The _tat-tat-tat-tat_ may as well be Frank’s heartbeat, going strong. The first one takes a bullet to the chest, falls to the ground and twitches. The second one turns his gun in her direction, starts shooting. He’s too far. She gets him in the temple, then turns back to the one on the ground and puts him out of his misery.

Five dead. Five that can’t shoot a gun at Frank.

Jenny breathes deeply in and out, and she keeps listening to the gunfire inside.

As long as there’s gunfire, she knows he’s okay.

Abruptly, the gunfire stops. Her heart races, and her breathing stutters no matter how hard she tries to keep it calm. She hears two more gunshots, steady, chest and head like you do to make sure someone stays down. She swallows hard.

“Come on, you bastard, come on. Come on.”

Someone bursts through the door, running. Not Frank.

Cursing, she tries to follow him, but he’s running too fast, and he’s going to be out of her eyeline soon. She fires, misses entirely, but he ducks, running even faster. She reloads, aims again, but it’s too late-

Another shot rings out, makes her jump. The guy falls flat on his face. Jenny lets out a disbelieving little laugh, turning the scope back to the northern entrance. Frank waves his arm over his head, once from his left to his right.

_No survivors. Objective achieved._

Jenny hasn’t prayed in years, not since that night she woke up in the hospital with a giant scar from one hip to the other, but when she snaps her scope closed, she lowers her head and says one anyway.

 

* * *

 

 _Frank got shot_ is something she discovers as soon as they’re back in the basement and there’s actual light to see by. He groans softly as he slips his jacket off, and she freezes, seeing for the first time the blood soaked through his sleeve and dripping down his arm.

“You got shot,” she says dumbly, and he grunts like she’s made a joke.

“Just a graze.”

That’s apparently a distinction that is part of her life now, but she takes him gently by the elbow and steers him to a chair. He’s looking at her funny, like he has no idea what she’s about to do.

“Can you get this off or do I need to cut it?” Her voice is remarkably even, she thinks.

“I can…” he trails off, but she doesn’t wait for him to hesitate. She takes the hem of his henley, pulls it up to reveal skin taut with sweat and scars and muscles, a whiff of gunpowder and something quintessentially _Frank_ , a scent she has become surrounded by, immersed in. She helps him pull his uninjured right arm out of its sleeve, then over his head before she peels it carefully down his left arm. He hisses a little when the fabric catches in the blood, tugs on the skin, but doesn’t move or twitch. When he’s bare and shirtless and looking oddly vulnerable, she has to turn away, tossing the shirt on the table to look at later. She kneels beside the duffel bag, looking for the first aid kit. She can feel Frank’s eyes on her, they make her hands shake. 

When she returns, pulling up the stool with her and planting it beside him, he leans back and watches her.

She pulls out antiseptic and bandages, hoping against hope he doesn’t need stitches. He lets her wipe at the graze with cotton gauze, but no matter how much blood it soaks up, there still seems to be more. She eventually pinches at the skin, peers through the blood. He’s hot and tense under her fingers, but he doesn’t say anything.

“You need stitches,” she says, and hates her life so much in that moment.

“I can do it myself,” he says quietly. “I’m right-handed.”

For some reason she’s reminded of the first day they met, when she’d snapped at him that she could take care of herself and didn’t need him to take her home. It feels like a lifetime ago. She doesn’t believe she was ever that weak powerless woman so angry at the world that she was willing to let it kill her rather than accept help from a man she had been taught to fear.

“I’ll do it,” she says, just as quiet. He doesn’t argue, just laughs a little, a soft sound. It’s low, pleasant, and it makes her chest clench. She hides her face behind her hair as she soaks the gauze in antiseptic, but she feels his gaze on her anyway, and she knows that somehow, he knows. He knows how she feels about him. He _knows_.

“This is gonna hurt,” she says, then pushes against the wound with more force than strictly necessary.

He hisses, then laughs again, a disbelieving little laugh. “You’re something else, you know that, girl?”

“Just, shut up and let me work,” she says, face flaming with mortification and self loathing. He chuckles again, leans back in his chair and tilts his head all the way back.

“Can I at least have a cigarette while you _work_?”

She pauses, threaded needle in her hand. “I thought you said no smoking.”

“I'm shot here,” he mock whines.

“Just a graze,” she mutters back, and he chuckles low and sinful. “Where are your cigarettes?”

“Side pocket, left-hand side, behind the shotgun shells.”

She stands up, finds them exactly where he said they’d be. The carton is almost entirely full, only two sticks missing. There’s a cheap plastic lighter wrapped in a rubber band. She pulls out a stick, holds it filter-out beside his mouth. He eyes her dangerously, leans forward and puts his lips on it. They just brush the edges of her fingers, and she yanks them away. She lights the cigarette for him, and he inhales deeply, looking relieved.

“I didn’t know you smoked,” she says, pulling out a second stick for herself, turning away from him to light it.

“I try not to. But sometimes it just… I don’t know, it helps or something.”

She nods, walking into the bathroom to wash her hands.

“Could say the same about you,” he says, voice a little raised to be heard over the sound of running water.

When she comes back out of the bathroom, shaking the water from her hands with the cigarette clenched between her teeth, she takes him in again. He’s glorious shirtless, not because of the muscles or the aesthetic, but because of the raw strength of him. He isn’t one of those shiny hairless men from the movies and the magazines, with the trim little waist and the faded little happy trail. He’s got hair on his chest, down his stomach, up and down his massive arms. It’s dark and a little curled, and his stomach is thick and all muscle. He’s leaning back in the chair again, head tilted back, cigarette in his right hand, bleeding messily. She thinks he’s beautiful.

“I was never addicted to cigarettes, but I’ve smoked off and on for most of my life,” she says, sitting back down and picking up the needle again, sterilising it. She speaks around the cigarette, puffs at it without touching it. “I like it,” she says, “always have.”

He’s quiet again, and she wishes he’d say something. She dawdles with the pickup, trying to position the needle in a way she thinks makes sense. When he continues to say nothing, she stops delaying and finally puts her hands on him. She pinches the skin shut and sticks the needle in.

“Damn, girl,” he laughs, groaning a little. “You’ve never done this before, have you?”

“No,” she says, embarrassed again. She tugs the needle through, gritting her teeth, then up the other side. She’s a little lost at this point, unsure how to proceed.

“Double wrap the thread around the pickup,” he says, making little looping gestures with his cigarette, “then pull the needle through.”

She frowns, slowly wraps the thread the way she thinks he means, then pulls it into a neat little knot.

“Not too tight,” he admonishes gently. “It’ll tug too much, makes it easier to break skin. Give yourself a little more room to work with,” he instructs as she moves on to the next suture. “Quarter inch of skin from the slice is good.”

She concentrates on this one without instruction, and it comes out a little better she thinks. “If you’d been careful like I said instead of getting your giant dumb self _shot_ , I wouldn’t have to do this,” she says, and she hates the way she sounds, all sad and angry and hurt.

He goes quiet at that, cigarette held to his lips while he watches her face.

Three sutures in, he speaks again. “I’m sorry,” he says, a little shy. “I’ll be more careful next time.”

Her fingers twitch. She hopes he doesn’t notice. “Good,” she says, then laughs at herself, parroting back his praise.

“I’m not used to… I forgot this,” he goes on. She stares harder than ever at the stitches. God, they’re a mess. “Forgot what it was like having someone worry that… having someone want you to get back out in one piece.”

She moves her hand down to his elbow, squeezes a little with shaking fingers. She doesn’t know what to say, and she can’t bring herself to look at him.

“Take my cigarette,” she says instead. He reaches for it, and this time brushes the sides of his fingers against her lips. He doesn’t snatch them away like she does, though. He lingers.

“Does this look like it’ll hold?”

He looks down at her stitches, grunts. “Probably not, no.”

“Shit,” she mutters, sitting back to look at them.

“It’s alright,” he says, “I’ll just take it easy for a few days.”

“Yeah,” she says, something tight in her chest unclenching at the realisation that he’ll be safe, at least for a little while.

“Slap some antiseptic cream on that,” he says, “then bandage it up.”

She wipes the blood off her right hand against his pants, and he snorts in annoyance. She rummages in the first aid kit for the antiseptic and the bandages, lining them up beside her elbow, annoyed she hadn't think to prepare them before she got her hands bloody.

“How much of this do you need?” she asks, showing him the tube.

“Just a dab, use your fingertip if it’s still clean.”

“That good?”

“Yeah. You can refold the bandage, in case it reopens. Got the tape?”

“Yeah, hold on.” She makes a mess out of the bandage, tangles the tape, gets bloody fingerprints on everything. “Shit.”

He chuckles at her frustration as she gently smoothes the tape down the bandage, a silent apology for being too rough with him earlier.

“It’s alright. You did good.”

She is furious, but her voice is small and it cracks. “You’re such an ass, you know that?”

“I’ve been told worse.”

“How come you think it’s a good idea to teach me about the history of American firearm manufacturing but you can’t spare one lousy lesson to _stitches_?”

“You just got your lesson, didn’t you?”

“This isn’t funny, Frank!” She thinks she is more surprised by her own vehemence than he is. Her hands are shaking again, and she wants to rub at her eyes, but she’s got his goddamn blood all over her hands.

“What do you want from me, Jenny?”

The question is loaded. It’s a goddamn gatling gun and it’s pointed right at her.

She stands up and stomps to the bathroom, washing her hands again. No matter how much she scrubs, the water keeps running pink. She scratches at the skin, rubs it with her callused and scraped knuckles. His blood is under her fingernails.

Under her wedding band.

“Fuck,” she whispers. “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck-”

“Jenny.”

“It won’t come off, I can’t get it off, it won’t come off.”

“Jenny, look at me.”

“I have to get it off!”

“Jenny.” He reaches over her shoulder and turns off the water. Jenny’s hands are shaking violently, and she can feel him behind her, radiating warmth against her back. He’s so close she can feel his breath on the back of her neck. “Look at me,” he says again, voice soft but carrying that undercurrent of command that makes her say things like _yes, Sir_ without a hint of mockery or sarcasm now.

She turns around slowly. She is caged by him, and he doesn’t step back to give her room. She stares at his neck, eye level, and the small silver chain that leads down to his dog tags. She can see the rise and fall of his chest with every breath he takes. Her hand automatically goes to the ugly ass bandage she put on him, covers it gently, wishing she could squeeze the hurt from him.

“I’m okay,” he says, voice low and measured. “I’m alive. I got shot, but I’m not dead. I survived. I’m here.” He swallows, she sees his adam’s apple bob. “Look at me.”

She tilts her head back, looks up into that unhappy face. God he looks so miserable.

Jenny doesn’t know what she’s thinking when she wraps her arms around his waist and leans her head against his chest. She can hear his heartbeat, a steady _thump-thump-thump_ that sounds bold and strong and fearless. She presses her palms against his broad back, pulls him closer. Hesitantly, she feels his arms wrap around her shoulders, his chin resting against the top of her head, his breath rustling her hair. He’s enormous. He’s bigger than life. He’s bigger than death.

“You’re okay?” Her voice is shaking.

“I’m okay.”

She doesn’t want to let him go. She doesn’t want to move. When he puts his hands on her arms to gently push her away, she immediately rewraps around him the moment he lets go. He eventually leads her from the bathroom, clinging to him like a barnacle, to the mattress she sleeps on alone every night. He reaches down and undoes her belt, her holster, pulls out her SIG and puts it down on the table, unwraps his own holster. He lets her cling to him the whole time.

“Come on,” he says softly, “here, sit down.” He lowers her slowly so she sits on the mattress, and she lets go a little, starting to feel embarrassed.

He doesn’t look at her, just kneels down and starts unlacing her boots. He pulls them off quickly, efficiently, not a single wasted motion. She stares at his hands, then reaches for him again.

“Just a minute, hold on,” he says soothingly, taking her hand in his before she can reach him. When he’s pulled off both her boots and socks, he sits beside her and leans down for his own.

She slides from the mattress, onto her knees beside him, and unlaces his boots like he did for her.

He breathes a little heavily at that, but she doesn’t let herself think about what that might mean. She just wants these damn things off so that he’ll let her hold him again, because she needs to, needs to keep her cheek pressed tight against him to know he’s really here. Her fingers shake badly, but he doesn’t reach out and try to take over. He just breathes heavily and watches her, that heavy physical weight of his intensity focused on her, until she finally fumbles them off.

She yanks at his socks, impatient, and he reaches for her this time, takes her by the arms and shushes her softly. “It’s alright, don’t worry about ‘em, it’s alright, c’mere.”

She straddles him, climbs onto his lap like a child, and wraps her arms and legs tight around him. She buries her face in his neck and realizes she’s crying, really crying, shaking sobs that make her shudder but that she still swallows down so that she doesn’t make noise. He holds her, arms strong and warm and infinite, hands rough in her hair, against the back of her neck, rocking her softly like she had a bad dream, and he’s here to chase it away.

She cries and cries and cries.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guys, guys!
> 
> Something I found out while posting this chapter is that my word count is totally out of control. I apologise for that in advance, because this is gonna be a behemoth when it's done.
> 
> If you're sticking with me, then I love you from far away.


	8. Partners

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As though some magical moratorium has been lifted, Jenny starts going out on her own. She goes with Frank on recon, they do their research together. He points out sources, how to get information, how to gather intel. He explains to her how he strategizes, teaches her to identify weaknesses and pick locations and use the environment to her advantage. He even shows her where he's stashed some money, so much money, more money than either of them could spend in a lifetime. “Stole it from the Italians,” he says simply when she asks where he got it.
> 
> "The Italians?
> 
> "Long story," he mutters, avoiding her gaze with something like guilt, but she doesn't press.

She dreams of kissing him, of holding him tight against her and touching him anywhere she can reach. In her dream he lets her, rests his big beautiful hands on her hips, neither holding nor pushing away, just resting there. He lets her lay soft kisses over his angry brows, down his nose, across his jaw, and he lets her kiss his lips, and he kisses hers back.

When she wakes up he’s still asleep, sprawled on his back and shirtless and furnace hot where she’s pressed up tight against his side, hand resting on his stomach. She’s never touched him like this before, never had a reason to. His skin feels too warm under her palm. She slides it up his chest. His chest hair tickles.

She turns her nose a little into it. He smells like cigarettes and clean sweat and gunpowder. He smells like himself. He breathes deeply. She can make out his heartbeat under her palm.

God, she's so fucked up.

“What are you thinking?”

His voice, sleep-rough and growly, makes her jump. He rubs her arm apologetically.

“I was thinking about how fucked up I am,” she answers honestly. He grunts at that.

“We should compare notes.”

His heart speeds up a little under her hand. He keeps rubbing her arm, soothing her as though it would soothe him in return.

“What are you thinking?” she asks in a small voice.

His hand pauses, then continues rubbing. “Just… I was thinking about you.”

Her heart does something painful in her chest, and her breath catches.

“I mean, I was thinking that you're so different. You've changed. It almost feels like the old Jenny died. It feels like I killed her.”

She stays quiet, thinking. “She wasn't a person,” she says softly. “She was just a ghost didn't realise it was dead. She had no purpose.  Do you-?” She chokes a little on the question, because _do you like me_ seems too juvenile to say. “Is this okay? Am I okay like this?”

“ _Yes_ ,” he says quickly, hand tightening on her arm. His heart is racing, she can feel it. Maybe that's what makes her turn to look up at him. His jaw is clenched, eyes fixed on the ceiling.

Jenny moves slowly, telegraphing everything. She plants her hands beside his head, waits for him to finally look at her. He looks bewildered. She lowers her head slowly and kisses the raised white scar on his chin. She hesitates then, but he hasn't pushed her or turned away. So she kisses him. Nothing like the kisses from her dream. It is chaste, slow, and Frank is tense, coiled like a spring.

She pulls away quickly and slips from the mattress, retreats to the bathroom to shower, burning with mortification.

They don't speak of it again.

 

* * *

 

As though some magical moratorium has been lifted, Jenny starts going out on her own. She goes with Frank on recon, they do their research together. He points out sources, how to get information, how to gather intel. He explains to her how he strategizes, teaches her to identify weaknesses and pick locations and use the environment to her advantage. He even shows her where he's stashed some money, so much money, more money than either of them could spend in a lifetime.

“Stole it from the Italians,” he says simply when she asks where he got it.

"The Italians?

"Long story," he mutters, avoiding her gaze with something like guilt, and she doesn't press.

They go to a diner one time, and she spends so long staring at the waitress that Frank has to growl at her to keep it together. She doesn't know how to explain to him the shock of seeing what she used to be, not without cracking open like an egg. They don't eat out again after that, they just take turns bringing food back to home base. She goes with him on three more missions.

The sparring picks up in intensity. She's not sure sometimes if it's because he's worried about her now that she's going out with him, or if it's because he's still tense from the kiss thing. Either way she gets knocked on her ass a lot more often, gets layers and layers of bruises, and doesn't once get a _good_ out of him, even when she lands good solid hits so he has his own set of bruises.

And now that he's pointed it out to her, Jenny sees the changes in her body. She's still not a skinny bitch, but she doesn't jiggle when she walks anymore. She feels like the way she moves is different. She even feels like her posture has gotten better. When Frank goes out, she spends less time with the guns and more time strengthening muscles. It's surreal to her, the things she can do now that a few months ago were impossibly difficult.

Winter thaws out a little, and Frank starts talking about moving to another safehouse above ground. Jenny has mixed feelings about leaving the basement behind, but she doesn't argue.

“Tell me about Daniel,” he says one day. She's on the floor with his knees on her feet, doing sit-ups and punching into his big hard palms. She pauses a little, looks at him. He looks like he can see right through her. She wants to be angry at him, wants to snap at him that it's none of his business. But she knows this part.

They're supposed to be partners.

She goes back to the sit-ups, breath hard but steady. “He was a surgeon at Lenox Hill. Said all he wanted to do since he was a kid was help people.”

They're quiet again, and Jenny has lost count of her reps. Not that it matters, they start when Frank says, and stop when he says she's done.

“You said he found you a place to stay. When he… when he found you.”

Jenny doesn't know what he was going to say instead of _found you_ , and she tries not to guess. “Yeah, got me into a shelter with a program for addiction recovery.”

“Shelter?”

“I was living on the street back then. Or, you know, in dumpsters when it was cold.”

His hands clench, a sudden movement so that she ends up punching him in the fist instead of his open palm. She stops, stares at him.

“How long were you living on the street for?”

Jenny sighs, adjusts the wrap around her right wrist so she doesn't have to look at him. “I don't know, a few years. When Tim… after he got arrested, I was in the hospital. My face was so fucked up, I needed a doctor’s note to legally change my photo ID.” She hears Frank inhale, but rushes on before he can interrupt. “I had to get this… surgery.” She looks up at him as she says this, wondering if he's even noticed she hasn't had a period since they've met. His face is intense but his eyes are oblivious as ever. She sighs again. “There was major organ damage. I had to get an ovariohysterectomy. It was... expensive.”

“The surgical scar on your lower abdomen,” he says, slow realisation dawning in his eyes. “Maria had… I thought it was a cesarean scar.”

She swallows hard. He's never mentioned his wife before. He had two kids, she remembers. One of them must have been a cesarean birth.

“Can't have kids,” she says, voice dropping. She has always felt ashamed of this, even though she knows intellectually that it isn't her fault.

She starts up her sit-ups again. Frank catches her fists and stops her. “Tell me what happened. After the hospital.”

“Drank too much. Lost my job. Drank more. Lost my apartment. Drank even more. Lost everything. I mean, I was drinking a lot before, when Tim was around, but when I ended up on the street it was like I had an excuse to not even try anymore. So I kept drinking. I drank until I almost died.”

“Daniel saved you.” 

“Yeah,” she whispers. “Daniel saved me.”

He's quiet for a while. She hopes he doesn't say something stupid like _I'm sorry_ or _I'm so sorry_.

“He didn't care that I couldn't have kids,” she says, more to stop him from saying it than anything else. She winces because she didn't want to talk about this either, but it just came out. His grip on her fists is tight, hot. “He wanted kids, but he said we could adopt. He said…”

Frank stares at her.

“He said I was still a woman.”

He swallows. He lets go of her fists. She resumes her sit-ups but she feels unfocused, sloppy.

“You _are_ a woman,” he says, voice thick and sort of rough. “Getting that stolen away from you doesn't make you less of a woman. It doesn't make you less of anything.”

Jenny grunts, but doesn't stop and doesn't look, and doesn't tell him how rich she thinks that is coming from someone who treats her like a gun, a tool, a weapon. She doesn't tell him because it's okay. She _wants_ to be Frank's weapon. She wants to protect him. She wants to cover him. She wants to have his back.

“Maria wanted to have kids right away,” he says, seemingly out of nowhere. Jenny stops, stares at him. “She always wanted a big family, so it made sense. And I was already a jarhead by then so who knew if I was gonna come home the next time.”

Jenny looks at his dog tags. “You thought you would be the one to die first.”

“We all did.”

Jenny tries to imagine having children with a man she suspected would die, but she can't get past the _having children_ part of the hypothetical.

“What were their names?” She doesn't know why she asks him, but she thinks she needs to know.

“Frank Jr. and Lisa.”

Her heart strings seize up, turn to concrete in her chest. She's never heard his voice sound the way it does when he says their names.

“What's your last name?”

She laughs a little, disbelieving. “We've been living together for like five months, man.”

“I know, but you never told me.”

“You never asked.”

“I'm asking now.”

Jenny smiles at that. “I took Daniel's name when we got married, so I'm technically Jenny Alves.”

She resumes her sit-ups so she doesn't have to see him look at her.

“But I was born Jennifer Cesare.”

 

* * *

 

They start talking more about their families then. She learns that Frank's kids were eight and eleven when they died. She learns that Maria was his high school sweetheart. She learns that his father was also military, that he died just when Frank enlisted.

And Jenny tells Frank about herself in return. She tells him about applying for emancipation when her ma died because she didn't wanna go into a home. She tells him about never getting her GED, because she started working straight away. She tells him about Tim.

“I thought he was the most beautiful man I'd ever seen,” she says. “Beautiful eyes, soft dark hair, straight white teeth.”

She tells him she was seventeen, and he'd been almost ten years older, and it made him seem even more beautiful because he seemed so wise and grown-up. She tells him he’d been married before, to a woman who died in a car wreck, and how that sadness had made him seem romantic.

She tells him how she found out after the divorce that Tim’s first wife had actually blown her own brains out.

They move to another safehouse, an old gym that's been boarded up since before the aliens and all that Avengers shit. They sort through the equipment, and Frank seems almost excited to have found new methods of training her. Honing her into a weapon.

They go out twice more. The fifth time, there's an argument, the worst they've ever had.

“There is no sniper position,” she says again, for the thousandth time. “That lot is over half a mile across, and there isn't another building for a mile around.”

“We'll build you a position, a lean-to or a primitive-”

“I'll be a goddamn sitting duck out there and you know it!”

“If you're too scared, then you can stay here, I don't need-”

“ _You're_ the one that's scared!” He snarls at that, leans forward across the table menacingly. Jenny takes a deep breath, because he's definitely radiating more _pissed_ than _scared_ right now. “There's a staircase on the east face, with a service door. If you let me-”

“Out of the question.”

“This is what you trained me for!”

The silence that falls is deafening. Somewhere in the distance, a siren wails, comes closer, then speeds away.

“We’ll barricade the main entrance with an explosive. Collapse it in. You come in from the back, on the southern face of the building. I'll cover the staircase, we'll do a synchronized sweep, crowd them into the lobby.”

“You're not ready,” he argues, weakly, sadly.

“I'm ready, Frank.”

She reaches out and covers his hand with hers. She's got some pretty impressive calluses herself these days, and they scratch against the scars on the back of his hand. His fingers twitch, like he wants to reach for her, but he stays still, staring at her miserably.

“I'll protect you,” she says, voice steady.

“What?” He looks at her, brows drawn down in confusion. “What are you-?”

“ _I'll protect you_. I'm your weapon, Frank. You gotta let me cover you.”

He swallows at that, looking more miserable than ever. He shakes his head, then laughs a little in disbelief.

“I thought I was the one that was supposed to be… I couldn't take care of…”

“You don't have to take care of me, not like that.” She squeezes his hand. His fingers twitch again, before he finally turns his wrist so that their palms touch.

“Okay.”


	9. Tick

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In her entire life, Jenny had only ever loved Tim and Daniel. They had been as different as night and day, Tim as charming and confident and well-spoken as Daniel was shy, quiet, thoughtful. Tim had broken off giant chunks of her that she never regained, while Daniel had planted new seeds in her, helped her feel more human and whole than she had since her ma died.
> 
> They had both changed her, irrevocably, in vastly different ways. And now...
> 
> She loves Frank.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't usually do this, but please be aware before you read this chapter.
> 
> It's rough. Read the tags, guys, heed the warnings, wade safely through the fuckery to come.

Jenny has only been in one firefight before, and she hadn't been a very active participant. This time she is comforted, fortified by the SIG in her hands, the Beretta strapped to her thigh, the XD Tactical tucked into the back of her belt, the rattle of clips and two hand grenades in her cargo pockets.

Frank had tried again and again to teach her knives, but she could never quiet the ongoing scream inside her head, or the shaking in her hands every time he handed her one. She assured him it wouldn't matter now.

She waits for the detonation to collapse the front entrance, counting seconds against her heartbeat. Forty-two seconds later, it rumbles through the building.

As soon as she pushes the door into the stairwell, two heads whip around to look at her. They are dumbfounded, distracted by the explosion, and they gape comically at her, cigarettes forgotten in their fingers. They reach for their guns but she pops them both in the head, rapid succession. There's yelling, and the sounds of handguns going off on the other side of the building. She listens for Frank's sawed off, then goes farther in.

Footsteps. Someone's heard her take out the guys on their cigarette break, and she hadn't accounted for the echo in the stairwell.

She tucks in behind the entrance, waits for them to burst through.

Three of them, two in the back of the head, third one in the neck as he's turning around. Six bullets, nine left.

She leans down and yanks the Glock from the last one's hand. The balance feels weird to her. She tucks it into the back of her pants, just in case.

By the door, she waits for more footsteps. She can't hear the shotgun anymore. She can't tell what Frank's using, there's too much shooting.

She takes a deep breath and leans carefully around the doorway. The hall is deserted, but she can hear more running. It's a good bottleneck position. She presses herself against the wall, takes position and waits.

There's three more, pulling up short when she shoots through the first one and he falls back against the guy behind him, clawing at his throat. Two more crowd the door, pushing forward. The guy in the back lifts his gun and starts shooting. Jenny empties her clip down that hallway, counting out the last eight bullets, dropping the spent clip and reaching for the Beretta in a smooth practiced motion with her right hand.

They're all dead.

She lowers the Beretta, reloads the SIG, then makes her way down the hall. As she's stepping over one of them he groans, lifts his gun with a shaky hand. She puts a 9mm in his head.

The door to the hallway is propped a little open on some dead guy's foot. She peeks through the opening. The lobby is just ahead, and none of them are looking in her direction.

SIG in one hand, Beretta in the other, she comes out the door and takes out three before they can even turn around.

Frank looks like he's pinned behind a column, a guy with a MAC-10 shooting giant gaping holes through the concrete from behind the reception desk, screaming wordlessly. He hasn't heard Jenny over the sound of his own mania.

She takes him in the shoulder twice, but by then her cover's blown and they've turned their attention to her.

She ducks behind a column, but it's flimsy cover. Frank is shooting again, breaking cover for her. She sticks her hand around the column and lets out some random shots, counting bullets in her head. Five in the Beretta, nine in the SIG.

It's no good, she's counting at least a dozen still alive and shooting. She reaches for her pocket.

“Fire in the hole!”

She yanks the pin, with her fingers like Frank taught her because it's stupid to put any part of a grenade in your mouth, tosses it in a low, perfect arc, and counts.

The fire and heat from the explosion is more intense than she expected, but already she can hear shooting again. There's a light ringing in her left ear.

She breaks cover, just in time to see Frank empty a clip in some guy's stomach, grappling messily.

She can't get a clear shot, but she can take out the guy reloading behind the desk. It takes three to get him to stop twitching, all in the chest. The guy that was holding the submachine gun turns to her, face a picture of terror. He's clutching the ruins of his shoulder with too pale fingers soaked in his blood, backing away and whimpering.

The guy Frank was grappling with lets out a final gurgle and dies.

“Who are you, who the hell are you?!” He tries to crawl away from her, but her steps are measured and her pace is steady.

When she's close enough, she puts a bullet between his eyes.

_Just another Kitchen widow._

Then there's nothing but silence.

 

* * *

 

Frank stares at her, face looking like stone in the flickering flames from the furniture on fire. He's panting, and she realises distantly that she is, too. She feels like he wants to ask her if she's alright, or yell at her or something, but she's smiling at him because he's alive.

“Let's go,” she says when he stays silent, putting away the Beretta, keeping the SIG tight in her left hand. She walks towards him, eyes scanning for injury. He's got some bruises on his face, and a busted lip. She can't tell if he's bleeding anywhere else.

She grips his arm just above the elbow, gives him a little push.

“Come on, Castle, move it.”

He finally moves, a brisk light jog she knows he can maintain for hours.

The air outside is cold and clean after the burning inside of the building. There are sirens approaching, sirens for them, and for the first time Jenny realises she's probably a wanted woman.

It makes her laugh.

Frank stays silent.

 

* * *

 

She doesn't notice she's bleeding until they're away from the scene. Her right arm is throbbing, and her shoulder, and her left thigh. She stays quiet, childishly, afraid of getting into trouble when Frank finds out.

Inside the gym, in the back room that used to be an office which Frank converted to home base, the light is harsh and illuminating. Frank stares at her with his jaw like granite, an odd throwback to that time he'd been the one hurt while she panicked that he'd been shot.

“Just a graze?” She hates that it comes out as a question.

The bruise on his cheek is really coming into its own she thinks.

“Let me look at you,” he says, voice like steel. For the first time in a long time, she's scared of him. She looks at him and he's all Punisher.

She slips the jacket off her shoulders, drapes it on the back of a chair. The long sleeved sweatshirt follows, and her shoulder is agony. She holds it awkwardly, trying not to move it as she undoes the belt, the holster, unlaces her boots, and finally, slips off her pants and socks.

She stands in front of him in just her underwear. She can't lift her eyes from his feet.

He steps towards her and she resists covering herself with her arms. She feels vulnerable like this, slow drip of blood down her arm and leg. Her shoulder is really starting to hurt now, and it feels like most of the blood is coming from there. She looks at it, stains across her stomach and waist, and it makes her a little dizzy.

“Sit down,” he commands, slamming a stool down behind her. It makes her jump, but she sits down slowly.

She extends her leg while he angrily rifles for the first aid kit, freshly restocked because she had insisted, because she was scared for him. But Frank doesn't look scared. He looks angry.

He startles her when he puts his hand on her back, big palm pressed right to the bare skin between her shoulder blades. He inspects her arm, then peels down the strap of her sports bra. She breathes raggedly.

“Through and through,” he says.

She stays quiet.

The sting of the antiseptic makes her eyes water. “I can't tell how bad you're hurting. You're being too quiet.”

“Eight,” she offers, voice small. “Maybe nine.”

He grunts, then gets up to kneel in front of her and look at the entry wound. “How does the arm feel?”

Jenny flexes her fingers, then bends her elbow. “Fine.”

He snorts at that, a disbelieving laugh, and lowers his head. She wants to reach out and touch him, to comfort him with soothing words.

He stands up before she can think of anything to say, comes back with a cigarette, the cheap plastic lighter, and a needle already threaded and positioned in a pickup. She tries to pay attention to the way he's holding it, what he's doing. She feels like she should know how to take better care of him when he's hurt.

“This is gonna hurt like a mother,” he warns, but he doesn't look at her.

She lights her cigarette, smiles at him. “I know.”

She smokes while he works, watching the way his fingers grip firmly, the way he palms the pickup instead of putting his finger through it. His stitches are neat, steady rows, little black stars across the place where the wound used to be. It looks so small like this.

“You're lucky,” he says, then frowns and shakes his head. “I mean this could have been a lot worse. Some people get shot here, they crack a collarbone or a tendon, lose mobility permanently.”

“I didn't even notice it until we were almost here.”

“Adrenaline.”

They fall quiet. He moves on to the exit wound, then the graze on her arm. He works meticulously.

When he brings the chair around in front of her, he pauses, eyeing the drying blood on her thigh. He swallows.

“Can I get another cigarette?”

He looks up at her, angry and stiff, then nods and goes back to the table. He tosses her the pack, and she catches it with her left hand, her thanks dying on her tongue when he pushes his chair closer and pulls her leg between his knees.

She shifts a little, aware all over again of how naked she is, how vulnerable. He stares for a long time, not touching. Is he looking at her? Does he see her? Not just the muscle definition of her thighs or the slow weeping wound, but _her._ Her _skin_ , her _body_.

Frank is masculine in a way that goes beyond the silly stuff society tells her to care about. He's raw, animalistic, almost primitive in the simple straightforward way he does everything. He moves like a predator, and he knows it. His thigh is thick and hard between her knees. She doesn't know whether to squeeze her legs shut and trap it there or spread her legs further apart and show him what he does to her.

She shifts again.

“Does it hurt?”

 _Yes._ It hurts the dumb soft parts in her chest that never seem to listen to her.

“Not too bad. Like a six.”

He looks up at her then, his eyes miserable.

“You've got some pain tolerance on you.”

She swallows, stares at his dog tags. He puts his hand on her thigh, finally, and gets to work.

“Tell me about Tim,” he says.

She flinches, a full body flinch that makes him jab the needle into the wrong part of her thigh. He looks up at her, steady and demanding. She looks at his dog tags.

“He was… he…”

He doesn't look away.

“He was a banker. Wore a suit to work and everything.”

He snorts at that. “How'd you meet?”

“I was working in this… cafeteria. Big office building. One of the women that worked in one of the offices, Annabella, she said…” Jenny swallows, because thinking about Annabella is still hard. “She was Tim’s sister, and...” Annabella had known, she’d _known_ , and she’d said… “She said I’d be perfect for Tim. She set us up.” They were married four months later, a handful of weeks after she'd turned eighteen.

“What happened to Annabella?”

“Don't know. She never forgave me for getting her brother arrested.”

“How long were you and Tim married?”

“Almost… maybe four years or so.”

“Do you remember the first time he hit you?” He bends his head over his work. Jenny wants to claw her skin off.

“Yes.” She swallows. With shaking fingers, she lights her cigarette. “I don't remember what we were fighting about, but he said I was disrespecting him.” Respect had been important to Tim. Respect and power.

“What did he do?”

“He…” _punched her in the face and held her down on the kitchen floor,_ “hit me” _punched_ “on my… on my cheek, and my… my mouth.” _And her eye and her neck and her shoulders. “_ And then he” _kicked her so hard she threw up_ “kicked me. Told me to…” _stay down, bitch_ “told me not to get back up.”

He had cried and begged for her forgiveness after. Told her he loved her so much, that she was the best person he'd ever known, that she was a saint…

It was almost two months before he hit her again.

Frank's hands have gone still against her, resting against the cold bare skin of her thigh. He isn't looking at her, he's looking at his hands, almost as if he can't bring himself to look away from the sight of them on her.

“You forgave him?”

“I loved him,” she says softly.

“He beat the shit out of you. Over and over again, for _years_.” Frank's voice is that soft disbelieving quiet she never understands.

She puts out the cigarette, burned down to the filter. “Some people think love hinges on a set of rules. He can't cheat, he can't lie, he can't lose his job or shit like that, otherwise you don't love him anymore. That's never been the way I loved.”

"He was a piece of shit."

" _I loved him._ "

He purses his lips at that, a tick in his jaw, then shakes his head and bends back over his work. “So what made you finally leave?”

Jenny is crying, quiet tears sliding down her cheeks and dripping off her chin, gathering in a small puddle on her folded hands in her lap.

“He invited three of his friends over. He let them fuck me,” she whispers. Frank's head whips up, eyes tracing the path of her tears, swallowing thickly. “I didn’t want to, but he… they tied me down and…” There are whole chunks of that night she can’t remember, and she’s never thought of that as anything but a goddamn blessing. “When they were done, I told him I couldn’t take it anymore. I told him I was gonna take him to the cops. So he stabbed me three times in the gut with the kitchen knife.”

He'd hurt her a lot over the years they had been married, but he'd almost always apologized after, and she'd always believed him. They’d laughed at her that night, called her a  _cunt_ and a _stupid bitch_ , said much worse while they fucked her. Raped her. She'd lain in that hospital bed more fucked up than she'd ever been, her insides bleeding, her uterus and ovaries gone, sewn up where he'd torn holes through her body, barely twenty-two and _barren,_ and all she could think was _what have I been doing?_

She wipes the tears with the back of her hand, unspeakably ashamed. “I thought… I realised then that there was a _hole_ in Tim. Deep down inside of him, a hole of enormous need and yearning that had to be filled, or else he'd… I don't know,” she sniffles, the tears coming too fast for her to wipe away. “He tried to fill it with evil. He filled it and he refilled it, but it was never enough. And all I could think was that,” her voice cracks, “ _I_ wasn't enough. I loved him. Even to me that sounds crazy, but I _did_ , I loved him so much. And ever since then it’s like...” she chokes on the words, unable to explain. “It’s like an important human piece of me _died_. It's like I'm _less._ But that’s what that kind of horror does, isn’t it? It leaves you less than human. And some people don’t ever come back from it.”

She buries her face in her hands, ignores the twinges in her shoulder and arm. Frank's strong arms gather her to him, and he rocks her a little bit, strokes her hair.

“If I ever see that bastard, I swear to God…” he growls.

Jenny laughs a little at that. She smoothes her hands down his back, feels the steady strength of him even through his clothes. She used to feel weak and powerless, she had hated herself for letting a man she loved beat the shit out of her, strip her of her dignity and her sense of self and her voice. She had given up on herself, and she had gone pathetic with it.

Then Daniel had nurtured her, wrapped her in his kindness and made her believe in good again. He'd comforted her, held her through the detox tremors and the sickness and the dry months that followed, cradled her with his endless capacity for love and forgiveness.

But Frank made her strong. He didn't just save her life and then protect her from the big bad world, he taught her to fight, to kill, to breathe slow and pull the trigger however many times it took to protect herself, to protect _him_. And she'd never been given that before, never been the one to shelter and defend. Only Frank gave her that.

In her entire life, Jenny had only ever loved Tim and Daniel. They had been as different as night and day, Tim as charming and confident and well-spoken as Daniel was shy, quiet, thoughtful. Tim had broken off giant chunks of her that she never regained, while Daniel had planted new seeds in her, helped her feel more human and whole than she had since her ma died.

They had both changed her, irrevocably, in vastly different ways. And now...

She loves Frank.

She lets out a shuddering laugh, brings her lips to the skin of his neck. She loves him. It had taken both Tim and Daniel to bring her here, to forge her into the raw material that Frank shaped to be his weapon. And now that she is, _she loves him._

“Frank,” she breathes, lips brushing against his skin.

“You scared me,” he says, voice rough. It makes her ache, and she tries to pull away to look at him but he holds her more tightly and takes an unsteady breath. “You scared the shit outta me. They put a hole in your goddamn shoulder, and you didn't even notice?”

“I'm sorry,” she says lamely.

He laughs at that, a wet laugh. “I thought it would be different, harder on you to look them in the eye and kill, but you didn't hesitate.”

She would never hesitate, never stop protecting him.

“I’ve never known anyone so strong or so brave.”

Her lips tremble. She thinks he's crying.

“Frank, please,” she sobs. “Let me… I want to feel it again...”

He releases her, but only to cup her face and finally _finally_ kiss her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A personal note here. I think to a certain extent, most of us will have had a "Tim" at some point in our lives, and the way we experience it, to whichever degree, is a complicated and sensitive issue. I'm only saying this because it's easy to have a sort of knee-jerk reaction of disgust with someone like that, but villianising our abuser doesn't make it easier on our hearts. We love who we love, very often for bad reasons, stupid reasons, and then we let them hurt us because we love them so much. We think it eases their suffering to make us share it, or we think, "They still love me. They're just having a difficult time, and if this is what they need to feel supported, then that's what I'll be for them. I'll be your punching bag. I'll be your doormat. I'll be whatever you need me to be because I love you."
> 
> And that's not our fault, because it's all part of the abuse.
> 
> If you're in a situation like that, I sincerely hope you find your way out. You are not alone. Talk to someone, anyone, talk to me if you like, and understand that your unconditional love is not a weapon to be used against you. Loving your abuser doesn't mean you're stupid and naive, it just means your heart is too big, too kind, too forgiving. Protect it from those that would take advantage of that.
> 
> You deserve better.


	10. Boom

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Filthy. Fucking. Smut.

“Frank, please,” she sobs. “Let me… I want to feel it again...”

He releases her, but only to cup her face and finally _finally_ kiss her.

She groans, a low sound she doesn't even recognise as hers, opens her lips and lets him in.

His lips are dry, rough, hands insistent. His busted lip is bleeding again, taste of copper filling her mouth. His tongue is hot, demanding. This is nothing like her dreams, this is nothing like the last time. He isn't _letting_ her, _she's_ letting _him_.

The stumble to their feet is messy. The stool falls over, clatters noisily behind her. Frank kicks his own chair, pulling her roughly by the waist so she has to lift herself on her toes to make up for the height difference he'd taught her to use against him when they spar. He's never touched her like this, her skin fire beneath his hands. The aches and pains of her brand new stitches are distant, out of focus, peripheral.

She can't stop touching him, and he's wearing too many clothes. Her fingers twist on the hem of his shirt, and he pulls away from her to pull it off over his head. She pants against his neck, mouths down his clavicle and his chest, licks roughly over a nipple. He smells incredible, a musky _male_ scent that's all him under a layer of gunpowder and sweat.

He groans, pulls her back up to kiss her some more. They both fumble his pants, fingers tangling together before she slaps his hands away, biting his lower lip and growling softly.

He laughs, that disbelieving laugh she used to think was mocking her, but it doesn't sound mocking now. He holds his hands up by his head, submitting to her, and she licks his smile, tastes it deeply as she all but tears the buttons of his fly open.

Goddamn BDUs.

“Come on,” she pants.

“Do it, girl,” he growls against her mouth, and she moans.

She shoves him back hard against the mattress and he falls, panting, smiling at her. She thinks again how beautiful he is as she kneels down to pull off his boots.

When he sits up in a smooth roll of abdominal muscles to watch her, she can't identify the look on his face. His hand cups her cheek, enormous and gentle. He rubs a big thumb across her lips. She kisses it, then pulls his pants down over his ankles, crawls up his body, pressing him back down onto the bedding. He looks up at her like he's in awe.

“You look like a goddess,” he says, blushing like he doesn't know how to say the things he wants to say. “You're a lioness. You're a queen.”

She breathes heavily, presses her finger against the swollen bruise under his eye and across his jawline, down his neck, over his chest. She can feel his heart race.

“Help me get this off,” she rasps, tugging on the back of her bra. He reaches for her finally, big hands across her back to fumble the clasp open and pull the straps down her arms. He looks dumbstruck. She laughs, and he blushes and lifts his eyes to her face.

“You never seen tits before?”

It makes him blush harder. Her heart does that thing, that flipping stupid squishy thing. She doesn't know what he sees on her face, but his expression changes, eyes softening as he reaches up and gently cups her face.

She kisses him.

God, her chest hurts for him. She hasn’t felt so much since Daniel died.

“Frank,” she sighs against his lips. She feels like she's melting.

He rolls them over, a sinuous motion of muscle and limbs, and seeing him above her makes her heart race. She feels his dog tags against her chest, cold and sharp, winds her fingers through the chain so they clatter softly against one another. They seem so loud now that there's no sound but their breathing.

He looks at her with that intensity that used to make her look away, and runs his fingers over her skin reverently, tracing the areola, brushing the nipple, lingering over the birthmark just under her left breast. The way he's looking at it, an odd little spot on her skin, she can't believe she ever thought he didn't realise she was a woman. He leans forward and kisses it, softly, then kisses down her stomach, over the raised white scars where Tim had stabbed her, across the long white surgical scar, fingertips dipping into the waistband of her panties to expose the skin there and tickle it with his tongue. He kisses the stitches he gave her last, the slightly skewed white line where he first touched her. When she shivers and moans, he smiles against the skin, pulling her underwear down her legs and tossing it over his shoulder.

The look he gives her as he settles himself between her legs is brain-melting. He kisses up the inside of her thigh, fingers cupping her legs, digging into the skin so hard there are little white spots beneath them.

“Let me hear you,” he says, voice about four octaves lower and already sounding wrecked. “Let me know you like it.”

Then he puts his mouth on her.

And oh, it's good. His tongue is rough, merciless, pressing insistently against her clit with the same focus and attention he dedicates to everything else he does. He tilts his chin, pushes it inside her, laps at her like she's got nirvana gushing from between her legs. She lets him hear her, makes sounds that would embarrass her beyond reason if she wasn't already beyond reason. She writhes against him, fingers flexing for a grip on anything, the sheets, her hair, _his_ hair, his shoulders - those perfect shoulders, large and wide and hard and perfect, so perfect…

He slips a finger inside her, tongue attacking her clit again, and she wails. He laughs, she can feel the huffing breath of it against her, and rewards him by bucking up into his face.

He groans then, slips another finger alongside the first, curls them hard and presses right there-

“Frank!”

Her orgasm tears through her, makes her arch against his broad rough palm holding her down against the mattress. She squeezes her thighs, traps his head as she rides the waves of it, grinding on his tongue and fingers until it's too much. She pushes against his shoulder, oversensitized, but he rumbles and presses her harder against his mouth. Her moan turns into a whimper. She tries to squirm away, but he wraps an arm around her waist, pulls her back.

“Come on,” he rasps against her. “One more, girl.”

She whimpers again, body torn between the desire for more and the raw scrape against sore tissue. When she looks down at him he's watching her, eyes intense and determined and commanding. She breathes deeply, tries to find that balance between pain and pleasure. She rolls her hips against him, twitching and uncoordinated, slides a foot up his thigh, presses it over his ass through the cotton of his boxer briefs. He growls against her, and she looks back down at him just in time to see him hump the mattress a little.

And it’s that more than anything, the thought that he’s gotten so hard for her, that he’s seeking friction from anywhere just to alleviate some of the pressure, all because he’s got his mouth on her, that’s what pushes her back into pleasure.

The low build of it in her gut is different, it’s always been different the second time. She recognizes it, clenches against his fingers inside her. He moans, pulls his fingers out - she whines, trying to chase them - only to push back three. She takes them, stretches easy around them, and they feel amazing and thick and long, the rough pads of them pressing insistently against her g-spot.

She cums again, a broken moan that turns into a sob when he presses his thumb hard against her clit and rubs. She twitches everywhere, muscles spasming, shoulders bouncing against the mattress as she shakes violently. His arm may as well be a steel bar for all the give.

He keeps touching her through it, panting heavily as he kisses her hips and thighs. Just when she begins to worry he’s going to demand another one he pulls away, looking absurdly pleased with himself. He wipes his face with the edge of the blanket, climbs up her body and snarls, “Good.”

And oh, she’s missed it. Her arms are jello and useless, but she brings them up to him. He folds himself into her, keeping his weight off but pressing his erection against her hip through his briefs. The cotton is rough against her, but she’s drenched and he groans like he could come just from this.

“Say it again,” she pants, kissing his jaw and cheek, licking the taste of her orgasm from his lips.

“What?”

“Tell me that I'm… that it’s good.”

He pauses, hips stilling, and pulls back to look at her face. Eyes dark, he says, “Good girl.”

She shivers. “How do you want me?”

His hips give an involuntary jerk at that. Something like hesitance passes over his features, and he licks his lips. “I don’t have any condoms,” he says, and she laughs a little at that.

“Okay. No condoms. If you’re… okay with that then, it’s okay. I’m not…” She swallows. “I’m clean. I can… If you’re clean, then it’s okay.” Then, like an idiot, “It’s not like I’m gonna get pregnant.”

He makes a sad face at that, and she brushes her thumb across his brow. “You sure? I mean-” he blushes like he wasn't just three fingers deep in her pussy, “I’m clean. But you… you trust me?”

Jenny thinks that’s the stupidest question he’s ever asked.

“With my life,” she says, voice coming out too serious and low, and she hates that part of her that can’t hide this from him.

He doesn’t say anything about it, though, just leans down and kisses her. She can taste herself on him, and she likes it. Jenny slips her fingers under the briefs, palms his ass. He feels unfairly good against her, and it makes him shiver when she digs her nails into it. They push his underwear down together, kicking it off the bed, and Jenny stares at his dick.

It’s not the longest dick she’s ever seen, but it’s definitely the thickest. He’s cut, and dripping precum that sticks to his stomach when he moves, and he looks absolutely mouthwatering.

He chuckles, pulls her attention back to his face. “What, you never seen a cock before?”

She snorts, swats at his arm, and she feels relieved, lighter. Like he can tell, he leans forward to kiss her again, lips insistent and hot.

“Turn around,” he says, and she doesn’t even think about it. She rolls over onto her stomach, and he lowers himself against her back with a soft groan. “Good girl.” She moans at that, lets him lift her by the hips, settle her on her elbows and knees. Instead of shoving into her he runs his hands up her thighs and groans. “The things you do to me. You know how hard it's been to keep my hands off ya?”

“I’ve wanted you,” she pants, head hanging low to hide her blush from him. “I've wanted you for so long. Wanted you to touch me like this.”

“Like this?” He presses two fingers into her. They slide in easily, and she moans and rocks back against them. He places his other hand on the small of her back, thumb rubbing into the dimple above her ass.

“Yes.”

“Yes, what?”

Oh fuck _._

“Yes, _Sir._ ”

His fingers disappear, but he's rubbing the blunt head of his cock over her slit, teasing.

“ _Good girl._ ”

Oh _fuck._

He pushes into her too fast, so she swallows the discomfort and breathes deeply. She drops her face to the mattress, holding her hips still. He rubs his hands over her ass and thighs, down her sides, then rocks his hips a little deeper.

“Relax,” he says, sounding strangled. “Come on, girl, let me in. You're squeezing too tight.”

Jesus, she's tense. Her breathing is all over the place.

“Talk to me,” he growls, voice tight. “You're being quiet. Am I hurting you?”

She takes a deep breath. “Just… give me a minute.”

“Yeah,” he says, breathing heavily.

Jenny inhales slowly, then relaxes her muscles. She feels the shift inside her, rocks her hips back a little. Frank makes that sound he made when she kneed him in the gut that one time.

“Come on,” she rasps, doing it again. “Come on, Frank.”

He groans long and low, presses into her again. God, he feels good and right, she feels full and he's thick and hot and heavy. The stretch is just this side of too much, the way everything is about him, and this is more than that, more than anything she’s ever felt with him before.

He's panting by the time he's buried in her to the hilt. He thrusts a little against her, and she feels his balls brush against her clit.

“Goddamnit, girl. Goddamnit. _Jenny._ ”

He drapes himself across her back, his hands roaming up her stomach, cupping her breasts, fingers pressing into her nipples, pinching. She moans, rocks her hips against him. He lets her for a little while, hands everywhere, tongue peeking through wet kisses against the side of her neck. He finally stills her with a hand on her hip, and the weight of him disappears from her back.

The first thrust is a revelation. Jenny claws her way across the sheets, ass in the air held firm in his grip because her knees wouldn't hold her up after the second thrust. She whines and curses, finds her way back up on her hands, pushes hard against his every thrust.

There's something freeing about it, being taken from behind by someone so much stronger, so much larger than she is. His hands are sweatslick but squeezing tight, little points of pleasure-pain that make her vision swim, breath coming in sharp gasps with every thrust against her. She can feel the tension of his thighs, hear him grunting, his voice low and guttural, and she realises...

“You're holding back,” she pants at him, voice scratchy and unsteady. “You're holding back, I can tell. Come on. I can take it.”

He slows down, leans over her, licks across her back and shoulder. She moans.

“I don't wanna hurt you.”

Her heart breaks. “I can take it.”

He presses a soft kiss to the side of her neck. She turns into it, lips seeking, and he kisses her sloppy and wet, grinding against her. She's dizzy with him, dizzy with the smell and feel of him, his massive bulk all around her and that thick girth deep inside her, she can smell her own sex and hear them, that soft wet sound of fucking.

"You're not gonna hurt me, Frank."

He chuckles hoarsely, then suddenly disappears, pulls out of her. She pants, waiting for his next move, because maybe she’s gone and pushed him too far.

His hands on her waist are massive, hard. He flips her onto her back like she’s a celery-eating thigh-gap skinny bitch, then drags her down the sheets by the thighs, folding her in half. She’s mostly pinned by him like this, by his massive arms bracketing the outsides of her legs and his heavy chest pushing down against the backs of her thighs, and she groans as she feels him slide back into her, teasing at first, halfway in and out, before he goes to town.

His pace is punishing - she enjoys that pun later - and brutal, and she’s again straddling that line between pleasure and pain. He’s too much, too thick, too hard and too fast, thrusting too deep like this, and she doesn’t have the leverage to control the pace or the depth or even the angle of his thrusts. She lets him have her, throws her arms up over her head and finds the edge of the mattress, holds on for dear life.

“Look at you,” he pants, hands sliding down her shins, nails digging into the skin. He leans back, grips her ankles and spreads her legs just a little beyond what she’s comfortable with, eyes fixed on where he’s entering her over and over again, that same brutal pounding. “You’re so fucking wet. You take me so well, you should see how you swallow my cock.”

Jenny shivers, lifts her hips into his thrusts. She feels every time he fucks into her like a jackhammer rattling up her spine.

“Look at you,” he repeats, releases one ankle to bring his thumb down to where they’re joined, rub around her stretched entrance.

“Fuck,” she pants.

“This how you wanted me to touch you, girl?”

“Yeah.”

“Say it.”

“This is how I wanted you to touch me. I wanted you to fuck me and I wanted you to touch me just like this. I wanted to cum on your mouth and your fingers and your dick until it hurt. Just like this.”

“Good girl.”

His thumbnail flicks her clit. She cries out, bucking towards and away from him at the same time.

“Jesus, you’re gagging for it,” he growls, sounding choked.

She wraps her free leg around his waist, pulls him closer, and he leans forward and digs his teeth into the side of her breast. His fingernails scratch down her sides, fingers digging too tight, teeth too sharp where he nips across to the other breast, leaving behind a colorful trail of bruises and teeth marks. Her neck gets a similar treatment, then her ankle over his shoulder, her forearm, anywhere he can reach. He _mauls_ her, sucking and licking and biting indiscriminately, never slowing down the deep gut churning pistoning of his hips. Jenny’s limbs become boneless. Everything in her gives in, flops back, becomes putty for him to shape.

“Frank,” she moans, unable to think of a single other thing to say. She is weightless, floating, her entire body rattling with the slam of his hips against hers, balls smacking against her ass. Her body begins to twitch, like she just came, and she thinks she could cum like this, like she hasn’t already cum twice. She’s just… overwhelmed by him, by his touch, by his lips, by his perfect dick fucking her open. “Frank.”

“That’s it, girl.” He sounds strained, on the verge of snapping. One big hand rests against her throat, not squeezing, but large and heavy enough all the same, fingers fluttering against the column of her neck. “Say my name.”

“Frank,” she gasps out. He bites down hard, just below her right nipple, and he growls, hips stuttering. “Frank, fuck, Frank, Frank.” He pumps his hips a handful of times, then stops, deep inside her, pulsing as he empties himself in her, rolls his hips and pulls her harder against him, like he thinks he can climb inside her. The sound he makes when he cums, even muffled against the mouthful of breast he all but chewed off, is the stuff of pornographic dreams. “Frank,” she says, breathless.

He rests his forehead against her chest, kisses a soothing apology to the bite, and adjusts ever so slightly. It makes her shiver. He sits up a little, leans back and plants his hands under her knees, lifting them up just as he pulls out, staring at her pussy like it’s the holy fucking grail.

“Christ, Jenny.”

She blushes, because it’s one thing to be accustomed to that intensity when he’s looking at her face or her body like he’s looking at a chunk of wood, it’s another thing entirely to have her vagina subjected to it right after he’s cum inside her.

“Anyone ever says you’re not a woman, I’ll rip their goddamn nuts off.”

She laughs at that, and while he laughs too, smiling at her in that soft secret way that makes her heart stutter, he can’t take his eyes off her. He hisses, presses one hand to her stomach.

“Do that again.”

“Do what?”

“Laugh. It makes my jizz leak out of you.”

“Jesus, Frank.”

“Push it out, girl.”

Jenny bites her lip, looks away, but she clenches obediently, pushes a little.

“Good girl,” he says.

She’s so fucking fucked up.


	11. Red

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Frank wages war against the Italians.
> 
> In bits and pieces, and with great reluctance, he admits to her that they had been coming after him, and that twice she’d been caught in the crosshairs.

The sex changes surprisingly little about them. They still spar, they still train, Frank still regurgitates every known fact about every known gun every damn day. They still go out once in awhile for work, but always together. Most of the time, Jenny takes the sniper position, but twice more she goes in with him. She manages not to get seriously shot again, though Frank takes a bullet to the ass one time that makes her laugh and laugh as she digs it out, then place soft kisses over the globe of his ass.

They go to the cemetery when the ground thaws, and they visit Frank’s family and Daniel. That night when they go back to home base, the sex is quiet, and if they both cry a little, well, neither of them mentions it.

Jenny gets her four year sobriety chip. Frank looks at it for long minutes later, when he finds it on the table while she’s in the shower.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asks, sounding a little hurt.

She hesitates, scrubbing at her hair with a towel. “I don’t know, I didn’t think it was a big deal.”

“You’ve been sober for four years,” he says, thumb rubbing over her bronze chip, tracing the serenity prayer on the back.

“Frank,” she says, feeling tired. “You don’t know what it was like back then, how fucked up I was all the time. I’m not _proud_ of being a sober alcoholic, I’m _ashamed_ of being an alcoholic in the first place.”

He looks at her strangely, the chip held tight in his grip. “ _I’m_ proud of you,” he says, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world.

That makes the soft squishy parts of her go stupid again, and that night she ties him down and rides him hard, orgasms over and over again on his cock while he tells her how proud of her he is, how strong and beautiful she is, calls her a lioness and a queen.

They tiptoe around their feelings for one another; or rather, _her_ feelings for him, because despite the sex - which is _fantastic_ \- she knows he doesn’t feel the same way about her. She works harder, trains harder, and he praises her and smiles at her and fucks her hard and fast for it. He doesn’t hold back, and Jenny’s never had sex like this before, a sort of wild manic sex that’s more animal than human. If they’re not scratching and biting at one another, they’re all-out fighting, punching and kicking and grappling like the line between sex and violence is no longer visible to them. They never make it out the other side unscathed, always sporting long deep gouges from fingernails or dark bruises or a limp or one time a black eye because he’d let his guard down when she’d done that twisty thing with her hips he likes and she’d socked him with her right jab.

One day, he takes it in his head to train her how to deepthroat him, which makes her so so hot that she can’t hear the word _good_ anymore without her vagina having a pavlovian response.

Spread out on her back for him, he sits on her chest, brushing the spongy head of his cock against her lips while he holds both her wrists pinned over her head with one hand. He’s already dripping precum, she feels it across her lower lip, licks it slowly.

“You keep doing shit like that, this is gonna wind up a very short lesson,” he growls at her, but he’s smiling and that makes her smile, too.

“Yes, Sir,” she teases, knowing what that does to him in bed.

He groans softly, bites his lip, and says, “Open up for me, girl.”

She opens obediently, letting him control the pace and depth. He presses a little against the inside of her cheek, watching the head of his cock move under the stretched skin. He loves that, loves seeing himself inside her. She runs her tongue over him, tastes his salty precum, inhales deeply the thick musky smell of his dick. She’s always loved giving head, loved the way it made men fall apart, loved that the sight of her lips on a man’s dick reduced him to incoherency. But giving Frank head is more than that. Maybe it’s because of how together he always is, how composed, how unshakeable. But he’s shaking now.

He pulls his prick from her mouth, and she releases him with a wet pop.

“Behave,” he warns, voice rough, fingers digging into her hair. She moans, relishes the sharp pain of it, then nods. “Good girl,” he rewards her, soothes her scalp with his rough fingers, then pushes back into her mouth.

He finds her threshold, that limit in the back of her mouth when the gag reflex kicks in, rests there for a little while, breathing heavily. His fingers on her wrists squeeze harder. She whimpers, tries to relax, breathing deeply through her nose.

“You ready?” he asks, voice still rough, but eyes intent on her.

She blinks once. _Yes._

He nods to show he’s understood, licks his lips, and then rocks his hips a little. The head of his cock nudges a little bit past her resistance. Tears form in her eyes, but it’s just a physical response. She focuses on breathing deeply. Frank’s breath is stuttering, but he holds still, lets her get used to him in this new depth.

“Again. You ready?”

She blinks once.

This time he chews through his lip, and when he stops, a full inch deeper than when they began, he’s panting. His fingers shake on her wrists, and the hand that wipes the tears from her cheeks is trembling. “Fuck,” he curses, sounding hoarse and already close. It turns her on so much, she moans a little around him.

The sensation is foreign, moaning with something so deep in her throat, but it makes him curse again, hunching forward over her, fingers spasming on her wrists. She makes a show of rubbing them a little, a little struggle for him.

“Jesus, girl. You trying to kill me?”

She can’t smile like this, but she blinks innocently at him. As innocently as she can with tears streaming down her cheeks.

He chuckles, regains control of his breathing, and says, “One more time. You ready?”

She blinks once.

And oh _fuck_ it’s good. She can feel the scratchiness of his pubic hair, nose tip pressed into the skin of his pelvis, she breathes deeply, _inhales_ him, and shudders under him. Her jaw feels impossibly stretched, sore, the best kind of soreness. Her throat works uselessly around him, a physiological response she couldn’t stop if she wanted to, but that she knows is making him groan. He’s got his fist in her hair again, and has cut off blood circulation to her hands, and she can’t see him from this angle, especially not with fresh tears in her eyes, but she loves it, she fucking loves it.

“Good girl,” he moans, “so good, you’re being so good. Good girl.”

She melts, attempts a little sucking to show her appreciation. It makes his hips stutter forward, even though there’s nowhere to go. The little nudge chokes her, and a fresh wave of arousal comes over her.

“You like that?” He nudges forward again, holds it a little so she can really feel it, struggles to breathe a little, then pulls back, just barely an inch. She breathes hard through her nose, blinks once. “Jesus Christ, girl, you really like that?” He does it again, for even longer this time. She can’t breathe around him, he’s massive, thick and hard and twitching on her tongue, against the inside of her throat, cutting off air. She rubs her thighs together, embarrassingly wet, and moans. When he pulls back again, she’s shivering. She thinks if he just touched her once right now, she could cum.

“Christ,” he pants, voice disbelieving. “You with me?”

She flutters her eyes open, vision blurry with tears. She blinks once.

His thumb brushes against her wet lashes, and she hears him suck it into his mouth. She wishes she could see him better.

“Gonna fuck you a little bit, just like this.” She’s never heard him this far gone before. “I’ll go slow. Think you can take it?”

She blinks once.

“Good girl.”

He does go slow, shallow thrusts, only pulling back an inch or two at most before pushing back deep against her, nose pressed hard against his pubic bone. When he goes deep, she can feel his balls heavy on her chin, hot and full, and it makes her _want_. Once in awhile, he’ll push deep and hold there, grind a little bit, each time a little longer than the last. It’s her favorite part, choking on him, knowing that she doesn’t get to breathe again until he pulls back and lets her. She can tell he’s close when his fingers on her wrists tighten again. They tingle in his grip, and she knows she’s going to have bruises for days afterwards.

“Good,” he all but whispers, voice cracking and hoarse. “Good girl. That’s it. Good girl.”

The things he does to her.

He pulls out after a few more thrusts, just in time to shoot all over her face. She closes her eyes, pants, lips parted, licking when a thick stripe lands across her mouth. “Good girl,” he says again, rubbing his cum into her cheek, then pushing it into her mouth. She sucks it obediently. “Good girl.”

 

* * *

 

Frank wages war against the Italians.

In bits and pieces, and with great reluctance, he admits to her that they had been coming after him, and that twice she’d been caught in the crosshairs.

"I intercepted one of their operations," he says, doing pull-ups facing the wall while she cleans out the M24, completely distracted by the mesmerising motion of the muscles in his back. "There was a lot of cash, a transaction in progress."

She snorts in amusement, shaking her head before the penny drops. "Wait, your stash?"

He stops, drops to his feet and turns around. He's breathing steady and strong, but loud and deep the way he sounds when he fucks her with that single-minded determination that gets her off over and over again. She takes in his heaving chest and shoulders, sweaty and glorious, and he smirks. "Pissed off the head of the family. Spoiled little upstart by the name of Julius Carbone. Matter of fact, he put out a bounty on me."

"How much is the head of the Punisher worth to him?"

He snorts. "I'm not telling, wouldn't wanna tempt ya."

She returns his smirk, but shakes her head again. "What's this got to do with me?"

His expression falters into that endearing awkwardness, but he tenses so entirely her fingers tighten on the barrel of the rifle. "This was back in October."

“The diner,” she says quietly, filling in the gaps. “That was them?”

He picks up his discarded t-shirt, rubs his face to hide it from her, but nods. When it comes away, he avoids her eyes, shoulders up by his ears as though she's gonna get up and hit him or something. "The diner was them. And after, in the safehouse. They must have followed me there and found you. I was... distracted. Wasn't covering my tracks.”

She isn't sure how she feels about that now. On the one hand, it nearly got her killed. Twice. On the other, if it had never happened, if she'd never gotten shot that night, who would she be now? She'd never have met Frank, or learned to fight, or ever understood what it meant to be strong. She looks at him, and her heart clenches at the thought. “So what’s the plan?”

His eyes flicker, something like relief she isn't blaming him for what happened, but he hides it before she can be sure. “We’ve been pussyfooting around their operations for months,” he says, dropping the t-shirt and unwrapping his hands. “But I figure, cut off the head.”

“We’re taking out Carbone?”

“ _You’re_ taking out Carbone.”

Jenny looks up at him, hope blooming in her chest. “Me?”

He looks at her, piercingly intense, then nods like he’s satisfied with what he’s seen. “Most of the city seems to have picked up on the fact that I’ve got backup these days, but no one’s seen you yet.”

“No one _alive,_ ” she smirks.

“Don’t get cocky, girl.” He smiles too, though, a little proud. “They’ll be coming after me. I’ll be the decoy, a distraction. Carbone is a coward, he won’t come anywhere near it. He’ll button up with his goons, and wait for them to tell him I’m dead.”

“So while most of his men are trying to kill you...”

“...you’ll kill him.”

 

* * *

 

Frank pushes her harder in the days leading up to the mission. They do their parts outside as well, planting seeds of rumors about Frank deciding to take out Carbone for good, that his pesky nipping at the ankles has become too big a distraction, and that the Punisher is coming for him.

The day of the mission, Jenny feels calm, intent, focused, checking and rechecking her pistols. She never managed to learn knives with Frank, they always made her heart race, her fingers clumsy. He stopped trying after the first few times, redoubling his focus on her hand-to-hand combat instead.

Now, arming up for this, she feels like she’s disappointed Frank. Knives would be good here, a lot of close-quarters combat going to happen. She isn’t just backup on this mission, she’s the gun hand.

They don’t say anything, sharing space, preparing themselves for what needs to be done.

Just before they part ways, Frank squeezes her wrapped wrist. “Remember, rendezvous at o’ two-hundred.”

“Yes, Sir.” She hesitates, then grabs a handful of his collar and lays one on him, biting roughly at his lips, tonguing at the blood. He growls softly.

When she pulls back she looks him in the eye and says, “Come back to me.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he teases, that panty-wetting smile.

Then they part.

 

* * *

 

There are three possible entry routes into the building. Carbone is holed up in a small building scheduled for demolition, on the top floor, three stories above the ground. Most of the manpower has moved out to hunt after Frank, where he’s making a lot of noise down on the ground floor. Eight of his personal security detail stayed behind. The third floor is a horrible holding position, open floor plan, just a few columns and tacky furniture. Lots of windows.

Jenny’s first option would have been to set up shop on the rooftop across the street. Lots of windows meant easy target practice. But they’d noticed the glint of the sunlight on those windows when they did a spot check the day before. Bulletproof, probably. Reinforced. So Carbone wasn’t a total idiot.

The second option involved coming in with Frank at the ground level, and breaking off at an appropriate place and time. Jenny would have enjoyed it, probably, but Frank didn’t wanna take unnecessary risk. Better Carbone didn’t get any warning she was coming, he’d said.

So that left the third option: roof access.

There isn’t any obvious way to access the roof from the buildings around it, so Carbone had only sent the one guy up there to keep an eye on the roof entrance. Jenny wishes she could have done without the sniper rifle for this one, but Frank had been right. No unnecessary risk.

She gets the guy on the roof with a headshot, easy as you please with no wind to speak of and from less than four-hundred yards out. Then she has to do the hard part.

Because knowing you’ve got the physical strength to grapple across four-hundred yards is one thing, but it’s another entirely when you’re hanging three stories off the ground with your legs dangling over a whole lotta nothing and you’re acutely aware of the fact that your arms are carrying the weight of both you and your considerable arsenal of weaponry.

Jenny thinks about Frank’s voice while she passes one hand in front of the other, breathing steady. _You stop when I say you stop_ , he growls in her ear. Frank says she can do this. She can do this.

It feels like too long by the time she finally pulls herself up onto the roof. The guy she took out is still in the same spot he fell in, untouched. Good. There was a contingency plan for what she would do if someone discovered him before she made it across to the roof, but she’s glad she doesn’t have to use it now.

Jenny props the rifle up by the door, draws her SIG from the holster, and takes a deep breath. Frank’s wreaking havoc below. Buying her time. Counting on her to do this.

She pushes the door open as quietly as she can. There’s another guy waiting at the bottom of the staircase, and he turns around and asks, “What happened, did you see something?”

His eyes widen when he sees Jenny, but he doesn’t have enough time to reach for his gun before she pops him in the head. It alerts the other guys inside, though, and Jenny could have used more time. This is a good bottleneck position, but she can’t risk waiting for them to come to her and possibly move Carbone to another location in the meantime.

She pounds down the stairs, twenty-two steps, and bursts into the room, rolling when she hits the ground. The moment she comes back up she takes out the guy that was trying to shoot her across the floor, and the one behind him holding his gun and staring at her like a moron.

Three down, five bullets. Five more to go, ten bullets in this clip left.

Someone clips her in the side before she can duck behind a column, but she gets two coming around the other side in the chest and neck. Someone says, “Mr. Carbone, we gotta move!”

She’s running out of time.

She yanks out the Beretta, and comes out double handed, widespread and chaotic. It gets the guy who shot at her in his arm, and he drops his gun. Something whistles past her ear just as she ducks back behind the column. Warm blood seeps down the side of her neck. Her side twinges, but she’s high on the rush right now, and everything else can wait. Dropping to her knees, she comes back around and kneecaps the guy that nearly blew her head off. He falls down screaming. The last one standing in one piece has Carbone by the back of the neck, but he looks panicked, gun shaking. He’s young. He can’t be more than twenty.

She shoots him in the chest, double tap to the heart.

SIG clip empty, she shoots the other arm off the guy who dropped his gun before he can manage to grip it with his left hand. She walks towards him, takes him between the eyes, then pauses over the one screaming about his knee and puts a bullet in his head, too.

Carbone looks at her, horrified, babbling about money, babbling about who sent her, but she isn’t looking at him.

Carbone’s wife is wearing a metallic dress, dark hair coiffed and makeup set perfectly, and her lower lip trembles. She has a black eye and a fat lip. Jenny turns back to Carbone, rage burning white hot, wrapping her hand around his throat and shoving him against the wall. She snarls at him. She can see the whites all around his eyes.

“Open,” she says, voice a soft hiss, pressing the barrel of the gun to his lips.

He whimpers. She hears something wet dripping, and smells piss in the air. “Please.”

“ _Open._ ”

When he does, she slides the barrel of her Beretta over his tongue, nudges it against the back of his throat. The sightmark scrapes against the roof of his mouth, and he winces. Jenny pulls the trigger and splashes the back of his head across the wall.

The wife starts screaming, drops to her knees and crawls back, cowers against the wall, arms over her head.

Jenny doesn’t wait for her to get her shit together. It’s o’ one-fifty-six, and there's still shooting below.

She pounds back up the stairs for the rifle, just in time to see the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen land on the roof, graceful as a cat.

That rumour campaign she and Frank started up seems to have worked a little too well. _Red_ , Frank calls him, and she can see why. It’s a deep red, a blood red, but it is most definitely _red_ , and there’s a lot of it. The Man Without Fear is something. When she gets past the fact that he's got horns on his mask, she's fucking terrified.

Jenny tucks the Beretta back into her thigh holster, holds up both hands and says, “I don’t wanna fight you, man.”

He smiles, a sardonic thing, billy clubs held loose by his side in a stance that makes her think of a coiled spring. “I get that a lot.”

“Listen, you wanted Carbone off the streets as much as I did. Now he’s off ‘em.”

“You _murdered_ him.”

“I _executed_ him.”

He snarls, fists clenching against the clubs. Jenny drops her right hand back to the Beretta, wishing she’d reloaded the SIG. Her heart thumps wildly in her chest. “You don’t get to _execute_ people. You’re not a judge, you’re not a jury. Everyone deserves a fair trial.”

She clenches her jaw, tries to think calmly. She knows he doesn’t carry a gun, Frank said he hates them. She knows his billy clubs are custom, full of neat tricks and a few surprises. She knows he and Frank have fought before, both against one another and on the same side. Right now, she thinks she’s shit out of luck though.

“Just drop the guns, turn yourself in. If you’re… if Carbone’s hurt you or your family, then a jury will sympathize. You’ll get a reduced sentence. Do the right thing.”

Anger surges through her. He’s talking like he knows her, like he has her all figured out. Frank’s right about her temper improving, but right now, all she wants to do is rip him a new one.

“He didn’t hurt me. Didn’t hurt anybody I know. I just did what needed to be done.”

“You're lying.”

“Fuck you.”

There’s a sick satisfaction in the way his face falls at that, but then he’s rushing her.

She can tell he thinks this is going to be an easy takedown, and probably it is for him - he’s taken out a dozen guys with his bare hands and she needs a fucking arsenal - but she surprises herself with the ease with which she blocks his first few blows. He looks surprised as well, then clenches his jaw and comes at her again. She can dodge and weave alright, but any blow she lands on him fucking hurts. Whatever body armor he’s got on, it’s doing its job, but she doesn’t stop. Her side is bleeding, her arm is bleeding, her ear is whistling high and intent, a _swan song_ , she knows, before the fine hairs that can sense that frequency die and she never hears it again.

She knocks the clubs out of his hands at some point, though not before he’d cracked her a few times in the ribs and forearms. He adjusts his stance without them, and she recognizes it. _Kick boxer._ She drops her weight on the balls of her feet, drops her shoulders, lifts her hands. She's way too outmatched to think she can walk away from this, but she can't stop. She shakes her head to clear her blurring vision, heart racing with exertion and panic. She feigns with a jab before landing a low kick just under the knee. He stumbles, and she skips the obvious target areas, throws her weight into a left hook that catches him in the jaw.

He recovers faster than she can think, and he’s _pissed_. He catches her arm on the next swing, twists it up behind her back, knocks her feet out and pins her down.

Her cheek feels hot and swollen where it's pressed against the concrete. She breathes heavily, the pressure insistent on her shoulder.

“It’s over,” he growls in her ear, the hard lines of his body immobilizing her completely.

She tries to get out of the hold anyway, feels that warning stretch in her shoulder, clamps down on the pain.

“If you keep struggling, I’ll dislocate your shoulder,” he warns.

“Then you better fucking pop that mother, because if you think this is the part where I burst into tears and tell you you’ve won you’ve got another thing coming.”

He’s breathing heavily, hesitating. A weakness. He doesn’t _want_ to hurt her, he just wants to _subdue_ her.

That rage races through her again, and she shifts-

Dislocating your own fucking shoulder fucking _hurts._

She swallows the scream, but the sound of it popping is loud in her ears. Red releases his hold on her with a surprised grunt just as someone roars, “Get off her!”

Frank’s voice is a fucking Christmas present. The weight on her disappears, and she can see Red run up against the new threat, scooping up his clubs in a roll that she can barely follow with her eyes. He moves like he really is a devil, sinuous continuous motion, like gravity and the limits of human endurance don't apply to him. It’s only watching the two of them fight that makes Jenny realize how out of her depth she was with him, how easy he was taking it on her. She’s out of her element, because she's gotten good, but she's nowhere near this.

He ducks Frank's left hook, a real doozy and she would know, and sweeps his legs out from under him in an elegant move right out of a Bruce Lee movie. Frank goes down hard, wind knocked out of him, Daredevil pinning him with his goddamn club pulled back, and Jenny cocks back the hammer on her Beretta and aims it at him one handed, right arm hanging useless.

“Back off,” she says, voice steady but heart racing.

Frank's eyes dart to her, and she recognises alarm and a little panic. “Stand down,” he growls at her, hand raised a little. Her ear really really hurts, but only when she stops thinking about how much her goddamn shoulder hurts.

Daredevil turns his head a little, breathing heavily, but she doesn’t lower her gun. “If you were gonna shoot me, you would’ve shot me before we started.”

“That was when it was just you and me in the ring, man, but now it’s not, so don’t think for a second that just because I don't wanna do this I won't put a goddamn bullet in your shoulder. Now back. Off.”

He pauses for just a moment, then steps away from Frank, hands still held up, that crazy ass club held loosely in a grip she recognises from watching Frank practice throwing knives.

“Don't even think about it, drop the club, Red.”

He clenches his jaw, and she fires off a warning shot, hits the wall just inches from his loosely clenched fist. He winces, shakes his head, but doesn't move.

“Now!”

He drops it. Frank is on his feet. “Let's go,” he says to her, picking up his sawed off where he dropped it, and the M24 where she left it by the wall.

“Why are you doing this?” Daredevil calls out to her before she can even lower her gun. “This is murder. There's a better way, there has to be a better way. You can't play God and pick who lives and who dies!”

“Jesus, Red, you need some new material,” Frank says tiredly, but he's looking at her.

“To save a life,” she says quietly. Frank looks like he’s stopped breathing. “That’s why I'm doing this. Just one life. If I can save one kid, one mother coming home from a late shift, one husband on his way home to his wife, if I can just save one of them from having to look into the pits of fucking shit in this city because they've been wronged, from fucking losing themselves in it, then it's worth it. I will kill every piece of scum in the city to save that one life. I'd wipe them all out, so that no one else would ever have to feel this way.”

Most of his face is covered, but he looks incredibly sad. “You can't save lives by _killing people._ ”

“The Kitchen is crawling with fucking _widows_ that say you're wrong!” Her heart hammers. “Can't you _hear_ them? They're always _screaming_!”

“Who _are_ you?”

“I'm nobody,” she says quietly. “I'm just another Kitchen widow.”

“Come on, let's get out of here,” Frank's voice is rough, like it gets when she takes off her shirt to show him where she's bleeding from.

He jogs down the stairs, and she follows him, and neither of them speaks a word.


	12. Knives

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> News of what happened to the Italians spreads. The bounty on Frank’s head goes up but now there’s a bounty on her head too. Te mobs have started talking about the woman that’s taken up the Punisher’s cause. She’s absurdly glad they don’t give her a nickname. She’s not sure what it would be, but she thinks it’d probably be a dig at her height or something.

“That was real fucking stupid,” he growls the moment they’ve locked down in home base.

Jenny is still breathing heavily, swaying in place as he puts a big palm on her shoulder blade, the other wrapped around her arm.

“Yeah, I know,” she manages through clenched teeth, trying not to tense. “He pissed me off, though. Wouldn't pull the trigger.”

“On dislocating your fucking shoulder?” He _yanks_ , and Jenny sees stars. He pushes her into a chair, pacing angrily. She watches him warily, testing her arm while she unstraps her belt and holster.

“You were really gonna shoot Red? The guy is trying to help people.”

“He was gonna take you out,” she says, voice laced with the hard edge of her anger as she half-heartedly dabs at the blood soaked into her neck and collar.

“So you _shoot him_? We don’t shoot innocents!”

“He was gonna take you out!” She shoots to her feet, fists clenched. “You got your code, and I’ve got mine, so don’t you preach at me because I’ve had enough sanctimonious bullshit for one night!”

“You don’t get to have your own _code_ ,” he snarls, stepping into her personal space so she has to tilt her head back to look at him. Her ear has stopped ringing, but it aches, throbs dull and insistent. “You don’t get to learn, to use me to teach you so you can be whatever the fuck it is you think you’re gonna be, it doesn’t work like that! When I say to stand down, you say ‘yes, Sir’ and you stand the fuck down!”

She wants to _punch_ him, so fucking much, right in that stupid mouth that she loves kissing and licking and riding, God he’s got a good mouth. “No.”

He breathes heavily, and Jenny gets to wonder if this’ll finally be the night she pushes the Punisher too far.

“ _No_?”

“You heard me, Castle,” she throws in a cheeky grin for good measure. Oh, he definitely wants to punch her, too. “I go where you point, I always will, you need to know that and understand it, and you should always trust it. But if you think I’m gonna let anyone hurt you while I sit on my ass and watch, then you’re out of your goddamn mind.”

His eyes flicker, and he swallows. “Jenny.”

“I will kill anyone that tries to hurt you. I will _kill_ them, Frank. You hear me? I’ll tear them apart with my bare fucking hands, you fucking hear me?!”

His hands on her arms are sudden, surprising. They sap the fight right out of her. He still looks angry, still looks like he wants to punch her, but he looks scared and unhappy and she kisses him.

They don’t manage to patch one another up until they’ve already made a bloody mess of the bed.

 

* * *

 

Frank wants to lay low after their run-in with Red. They dump the safehouse, move again. This time it’s an abandoned brownstone that got declared unsafe after the alien invasion. It smells like mold and something dead stuck in the walls, but it’s got a second floor and doors and shit. It’s the first time since they’ve started that they have room to move around one another, to spread out without getting in one another’s ways, but they still cluster tight in one bedroom, put all their shit together on some crappy tables they find in the basement that they line up against the windows.

Frank drags a mattress from a dumpster, and Jenny buys sheets at the dollar store, and they break it in that same day. It’s new, having an actual bed, even if the mattress is too big for the box and hangs off one side, but she likes having a headboard to hold onto when he fucks her from behind.

News of what happened to the Italians spreads. The bounty on Frank’s head goes up but now there’s a bounty on her head too. Te mobs have started talking about the woman that’s taken up the Punisher’s cause. She’s absurdly glad they don’t give her a nickname. She’s not sure what it would be, but she thinks it’d probably be a dig at her height or something.

When Frank shows her the article about Carbone being taken out in ‘a coordinated strike against the Italian mob’ by what are ‘obviously trained professionals, possibly with CIA backgrounds’, he rubs her back proudly. Jenny preens at his attention, even if she never does hear the end of the fact that she got the top part of her ear shot off.

Frank ups her hand-to-hand combat training. He doesn’t want her shooting Daredevil, but he doesn’t want her getting her ass handed to her again either. He brings up knives again.

“I know you haven’t… taken to it before. But you take to everything else I teach ya. A knife can save your life in a fistfight, believe me.”

“I know, I just…” she shivers, fingers fluttering unconsciously to her stab wounds. “I can’t. Don’t ask me, Frank. I can’t.”

He frowns like he’s thinking of ordering her to do it anyway, but nods instead and says, “Fine. Maybe you should learn some stick fighting instead.”

It’s only days later that Tim shows up.

 

* * *

 

Jenny’s going on a supply run, thinking they’re gonna need more cigarettes now that it’s become a shitty tradition for them to smoke while they patch up, when someone calls out to her. She doesn’t realize they’re calling her at first, for one thing because no one calls her except Frank, and for another because he isn’t saying _Jenny_. He’s saying-

“Jennifer!”

Jenny's head whips around, because only one man alive ever called her that, and she gets punched in the eye before she can see for herself.

It's just as well, she'd recognise that voice anywhere.

She tries to blink, a little confused why she's on her hands and knees in the alley, when he grips her by the hair, presses her face against the wall.

Frank showed her how to get out of this hold a thousand times. She could do it in her sleep, but she can _smell_ him, the familiar scent of menthols and that nice beer he liked to drink, and for some reason everything Frank taught her is gone.

“I missed you, baby,” he says, breath hot against her ear. “I thought of you everyday in prison, my loving fucking _wife._ ” He punctuates by slamming her head into the wall.

She chokes on the pained cry.

“And the whole time I was thinking of you, I made plans for when I got out, and how I was gonna teach you to show a little goddamn respect.”

He tightens his hold in her hair, presses her against the brick, and punches her twice in the kidneys. She only barely manages to stay quiet, because that fucking hurts, and she’d forgotten it was a specialty of his towards the end, when he’d stopped apologizing after every time.

He turns her around then, hand around her throat, fingers pressing in. He doesn’t quite manage to cut off the air supply, but it’s a close enough thing. She's breathless anyway because she hasn't seen him in years. He looks different, teeth stained yellow, hair thinning, skin garish, face gaunt. He scares the shit out of her.

“You let them arrest me, you fucking _whore_!”

That's when he really starts in on her, punches her face, her neck, kicks her in the ribs and the stomach when she can’t stand anymore and huddles on the ground against the wall, on and on in an endless silent rain of blows meant to inflict the greatest amount of pain.

“You ruined my goddamn life you fucking bitch!” He grabs her face, fingers squeezing into the her cheeks so hard her teeth hurt. “Do you know what they do to guys that look like me in fucking _prison_?” He lets go of her face to backhand her, roughly. His technique is sloppy, a distant part of her realises. She drops back to the ground, boneless.

Tim undoes his belt, laughs a little. “I'm gonna show you. I'm gonna show you what they did to me in there. You bitch. You fucking cunt.” His hand finds her hair again, pushes her down, down, down until she’s facedown in the filthy alley, and she goes limp.

She had been trained for this long before Frank trained her for anything, and for a much longer time. She knows to stay limp, that if she doesn’t there’s tearing and bleeding. She knows to protect her head, and not to make a sound if she doesn’t want to spur him on. She knows not to ever, _ever_ , try to close her legs against him.

He taught her well.

His weight is all wrong over her, too skinny, too light. The shape of him is wrong. He smells like menthols, and booze, and Frank never drinks around her, never lets her taste it on his tongue. She tastes it on Tim’s tongue, though.

His hands are rough, and he's impatient. He tears her tights, shoves his hands into her panties.

She cries, silent tears and a tremor that she can't stop, but she doesn't fight, doesn't push or even lift her arms. She just lays there, and she has never hated herself more.

She thinks distantly that Frank is going to be so disappointed in her. The thought of Frank breaks her heart. She closes her eyes.

“You goddamn son of a bitch!”

Tim not only disappears from on top of her, he _flies_ off. Frank is on him, massive and raging. She's never seen him like this, bare knuckled and roaring, no neat controlled combos, just flying fists all over Tim’s face and torso. He grabs him by the collar and slams the back of his head against the brick wall. It bounces off with a sickening crack, and Tim goes limp.

Frank doesn't stop.

He follows him down, sits on his chest and punches him over and over and over again. His fists are bloody, pieces of Tim are flying in a spray with every blow. Teeth scatter, the sounds of cracking bone as the skull beneath the skin gives way to Frank's fury, grunting and cursing hoarsely with an edge of mania she's never seen in him before. For the first few hits, Tim's feet twitch with every blow. But they stop, and Frank keeps going.

“He's dead,” Jenny whispers, lips swollen and bleeding so it comes out garbled. She gets shakily to her feet. “Frank, stop. He's dead.”

She stumbles towards him, battered and beaten and in horrible pain, all but falls against his back. He stills like he's been frozen the moment she touches him, sucking in gasping breaths with his big bloody fist pulled back beside his head. She touches it, and he flinches, but she squeezes and pushes her face against his neck.

“Enough, Frank, he's dead, he's dead.”

He stands up then, big arms vibrating with anger wrapping around her, and for the first time in months, she feels small and weak and powerless again. She sobs into his chest, silent body-wracking sobs, and he holds her too tight, turning her away from the sight of Tim's unrecognisable corpse.

 

* * *

 

Back at home base, Frank wipes gently at her face and neck with a damp washcloth. He touches every bruise with his fingertips, and his jaw ticks incessantly.

Jenny feels dizzy, not concussed just shock, the stupidly calm part of her mind thinks.

She's killed over fifty people since working with Frank, and watched him kill more, but she's never seen him beat a man to death with his bare hands.

“I'm sorry,” she says finally, fat lip slurring her words.

“What the hell are you goddamn sorry for?”

He sounds so angry. She flinches.

“I'm sorry I forgot my training, Sir.”

He stops, staring at her face in disbelief, but looking at her face makes him angry all over again. He gets up from the chair in front of her, picks up a box of ammo from the table and throws it against the wall with a roar. The bullets scatter, little metallic pings where they bounce off the cheap hardwood.

Jenny flinches, cowers. She feels like she's reverted to a person she never thought she'd be again. The last time she'd seen Tim was almost eight years ago. She was just a kid back then. But she feels that way now, small and frightened and alone and unloved.

“The only thing you should be apologizing for is that I only got to kill the bastard once.”

Jenny curls in on herself, lifts her feet onto the chair and hugs her knees. Her ribs and her kidneys and everything else hurts, but pales in comparison to the churning in her gut and mind.

Frank comes back to his chair in front of her, takes her hands in his, rubs his thumbs against her skin. It's intimate, frightening. Despite the acrobatic sex, they don't do things like this. They don't hold hands or snuggle or peck on the lips. But he's holding her hands now.

“I'm not mad at you,” he says slowly, like it kills him to say it. “I'm mad because… because I'm looking at you now, and all I can think of is how many times he did this to you, and no one did a goddamn thing to stop him.”

He lifts one hand up to cup her face gently, fingers shaking over her black eye swollen shut and her fat cheek and busted lip.

“I'm supposed to be your weapon,” she says quietly, voice shaking.

“You're not just a weapon, Jenny.”

And her heart stutters, stupid and hoping at that, because what is she then? What does she mean to him? How does he feel about her? She’s humiliated by these questions and they’re just inside her own head.

She hates herself like this on a good day, and today is most definitely not a good day.

“I think I'm gonna hurl,” she says elegantly.

Frank's arms pick her up easily, drag her even when she stumbles and lower her gently in front of the toilet seat.

She wants to tell him to go away and not watch her blow chunks, but he holds her hair and rubs her back, talking her through it, soothing and strong and oh _God_ she hates herself so much, she's fucking choking on it.

When she's finally done, he gets another washcloth and wipes her face, then holds her up while she rinses, which makes her throw up again and so he repeats the whole process again. He is endlessly patient through it, endlessly gentle, wipes her down and undresses her, tends every single wound, dabs every cut, kisses every bruise.

She hates herself so much.

He holds her like she's precious, like she means something, like she matters. Frank kisses the side of her mouth that's less hurt, softly soothes the dull aching pain in her temple by rubbing it with his big callused thumb, better suited to the hammer of a gun than this, but _this_ is what she loves him for, she thinks. Not the raw strength of him, the fearlessness, the righteous surety of his power. She loves the gentleness, the kindness, the uncertainty and the trembling lips he presses to her jaw alongside a sprawling bruise.

And when she reaches for him, unable to deny herself the taste and feel of him, she hates herself more. But he goes to her, willingly lets her wrap her arms around him. She’s naked and trembling, a terrible fucking picture, a landscape of scrapes and bruises still fresh and darkening. She can smell the alley on herself, smell the menthols and still taste that beer in her mouth through the blood. She reaches for Frank, cups him through his jeans. He grunts, and he's soft under her palm, but he doesn't move her hand away.

“Fuck me, Frank. I want you to fuck me.”

He doesn’t ask her if she’s sure, doesn’t try to stop her, and she’s so so thankful for that. She kisses him, wincing a little at the pain when her cut lip reopens, but he doesn’t seem to care, licks into her mouth and nips at her tongue like he can’t get enough of the taste.

He lets her unzip his fly, lets her push the jeans and boxers down his ass halfway down his thighs, lets her grip his soft length in her hand and stroke him roughly, not teasing or slow or meant to drive him wild the way she loves, just a means to an end.

When she’s satisfied that he’s hard enough, she pulls him against her, wraps her legs around his waist and nudges him into her. He goes willingly, nipping at her neck in that spot below her ear that makes her moan. He pushes into her hard, like he knows what she needs, like he understands she doesn’t want to be handled gently, treated like a broken thing, she wants to be reminded of her strength.

She wants him to show her that she can take it.

God, does he show her. He slams hard into her, fucks her against him while his arms squeeze vice like around her waist, against her protesting ribs and kidneys and sides, scratches at her ass, her thighs, her back. He snarls and bites at her neck, and she drops her head back and lets him, open, vulnerable, an invitation that he enthusiastically accepts. He sucks bruises into her bruises, sex overlaying violence, the most fitting metaphor she can think of for this fucked up thing she’s living in. But she doesn’t care because she feels it, she can _feel_ it, and she never thought she’d be able to feel anything ever again. She never thought…

He grunts when she flips him, wraps her shaking fingers tight around his wrists and pins him down. His eyes are dark, intense, and she thinks he must know, he must feel it through her, thrumming and incessant and unbearably loud. She rides him, pressing hard against his wrists, and he lets her. She thinks it would be the easiest thing in the world for him to buck her off of him right now, to pin her down and make her submit, and most of the time that's how sex is with them. A battle. A fight.

He doesn't.

She groans and gasps, tilting her head back, legs shaking with exertion and fear and something else she desperately runs away from. She thinks she's breaking apart, coming undone, she's going to turn into dust and bones and never be real or whole again.

She tangles her fingers in his hair, too short at the base of his head but just enough to latch onto at the top. She yanks it hard, trying to kiss him but too sloppy, tongue and teeth everywhere. That’s when he presses his fingers against her clit, too rough, too hard, and says, “Cum on my dick, girl.”

She wails, arching and pushing, hoarse screams when she does cum, hard and shaking, gushing around his cock like she knows he likes, knees locked against his sides and she tries to pull him deeper, feels him too deep, nudging her cervix in that pleasure-pain she needs.

When she collapses, a useless heap against his chest, he flips her onto her back, grunting as he drives back into her, holding her legs open by the knees to watch himself cum in her with a low growl. She spreads her legs, feels the warmth of him drip down over her taint when he pulls out, loves the way he stares.

He reaches with his fingers then, scooping his cum from her ass, pushes it back into her.

“Good girl.”

 

* * *

 

“How did you find me?” she asks him that night, wrapped up in him even though everything is bruised and hurt. “How did you know?”

“I knew he’d been out for a while.”

Jenny stiffens at that. “You didn’t tell me.”

“You didn’t wanna know.”

He’s right about that. She had never tried to find out, never wanted to know, never even wanted to hear his name.

“So you've been following me?”

“Yeah.” His arm tightens around her waist. “That okay?”

“Bit late to ask now, isn't it?” He stiffens behind her. “He would have… he would have killed me if you hadn’t been there.”

He would have done worse than that first, but she can’t think about that right now.

He presses his lips to the side of her neck like he knows what she’s thinking. He doesn't kiss her, doesn't lick, just breathes raggedly against the sore skin there, like he's trying to inhale her, and she is absurdly glad that he can’t see her face right now.

“I lost track of you, though. I couldn’t find you. You were being quiet.”

“It was like I was eighteen again,” she whispers, voice cracking. His hand slides up her waist, wraps across her chest, and he holds her tight to him.

“He’ll never hurt you again.”

“You killed him.”

“I’ve killed a lotta people, girl.”

“You killed him for me.”

He breathes shakily and doesn't say anything.

“Thank you.”

 


	13. Gift

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A few weeks after the Hungarian job, Frank comes into home base with blood on his shirt and says, “Come with me.”
> 
> She puts down the ammo she's been counting, stands up slowly. “You alright?” she asks, eyes scanning him for injury.
> 
> He swallows hard, then says something he’s never said to her before.
> 
> “Please.”

Something changes in the way they fuck after that, something Jenny doesn’t want to think about or try to understand. It’s too much, she thinks, too much irony or cruelty or something, but it’s terrifying above all else and she doesn’t want to face it. Frank watches her when they do, hips snapping against hers, breath sawing, foreheads pressed together like he could absorb her thoughts, while her heart beats out her real feelings loud enough to reach the dead.

He knows. He  _has_ to know. The whole fucking world must know, and it terrifies her, drives her to teeth-grinding insanity.

Red finds her one time, when she's rounding out a scoping position for a hit on a Hungarian child prostitution ring. Frank is just on the other side of the block, but Jenny hopes he takes his time there.

“You here to finish the job?” she asks him, hands tucked into her pockets to hide the fact they're shaking.

“Rosalie Carbone is asking questions about you,” he responds, the visible part of his face all stern and angry. He could use a shave. He looks dead on his feet.

“Rosalie Carbone?”

“The wife of the man you murdered,” he hisses, all Devil.

“Murdered a lot of people, man,” she says, leaning against a wall and grinning just to be cheeky. There's a space between buildings she could try to get to behind her, but it's too enclosed, she'd be vulnerable if he chased her. The open mouth of the alley is past him, and after seeing the way he moves she knows she doesn't have a chance in hell of making it unscathed.

“Is this what Castle’s been teaching you? _Irreverence_ to human life?”

The anger bubbles up her chest at that. “Nah, learned that all on my own.” She stands up straight and takes a step towards him, just to keep him on his toes. Her gun is tucked into the back of her pants, but Frank doesn't want her shooting this guy so she keeps her clenched fists in her pockets. “Why the hell would she be asking questions about me?”

He makes a disbelieving sound, all mocking and angry. “You shot her husband. You made her watch.”

“He was a piece of shit. He was knocking her around! She should be _thanking_ me!”

“For making her a _widow_?” He pauses a beat, then more quietly, “Like you?”

Jenny isn't sure how to describe the way her chest clenches. With Tim dead, with Daniel dead, everyone she's ever loved is gone now. Everyone but…

“What do you want, Red?”

He looks surprised at the question, mouth parted a little. His stance shifts, and she unconsciously matches it. If he's going to throw down, she'll hold her own. Hopefully she can end it one way or another before Frank gets back and ends up in the middle again.

Just when she thinks he's going to make a move, he turns his head to the side, like he's listening for something. Jenny hesitates, holds her breath. She can't hear a fucking thing.

“Think about doing the right thing. Think about all the widows you've already made. It isn't too late to find a better way of dealing with whatever’s happened to you.” He takes a few steps, leaps up to a low hanging fire escape, draws himself up easily in a graceful move that Jenny envies. “And be careful.”

He disappears up the shadows on the side of the building, but she keeps staring into them, trying to figure him out.

“You see something?”

She jumps, startled. Frank frowns at her, and she hopes she doesn't get a lecture on distraction and alertness. “Nah, nothing. Let's go.”

 

* * *

 

A few weeks after the Hungarian job, Frank comes into home base with blood on his shirt and says, “Come with me.”

She puts down the ammo she's been counting, stands up slowly. “You alright?” she asks, eyes scanning him for injury.

He swallows hard, then says something he’s never said to her before.

“Please.”

She tucks her SIG into the back of her pants, laces up her boots, and stands obediently beside him. He nods once, then leads the way out.

The drive is silent, except for the noisy as shit truck, and Jenny starts to feel a little nervous. She doesn't have a frame of reference for this, hasn't been expected to blindly follow Frank since that first night and the guy from the DA office. She wants to ask about the blood on his shirt, but for the first time in a long time, she's scared of where Frank is telling her to go.

They pull up outside a rundown warehouse in the old abandoned section of the river docks before he kills the engine, turns to her, and says, “I got you something.”

She blinks, confused. “You got me a warehouse?”

He snorts. “No, it's inside.”

Jenny peeks past him. “What the hell did you get me?” There is literally nothing in the world she can think of that she would want.

“Come and see.”

He gets out of the car then, and as Jenny follows him she realises he's nervous. If she weren't so confused, she might find it adorable.

Inside, the warehouse is dusty, floor littered with discarded needles and bent spoons. In the dead center, a chair is set right in the thin beam of light from the street lamp outside the window. There's someone tied to it, slumped down. A woman. Her dark hair is hiding her face, and Jenny stops to look at Frank.

“What is this?”

“I killed Tim.”

Okay. She hadn't been expecting _that._

“I know, Frank. I was there.”

He still looks nervous. “That's not what I meant.” He shifts his weight. “I wanted to kill him for… when you told me about the shit he did. But I always figured, you must have wanted to kill him even more. And now you can't, because I got my hands on him instead.”

There's an awkward silence that hangs in the air as they remember that night.

“So this is to make up for that.” He jerks his chin at the bound woman, who stirs and finally lifts her head. Jenny can't make out more than her terrified gasping in the dark.

“Who is she?”

“Annabella Buccato.”

Jenny's heart lurches, and she whips back around to face Frank. “What?”

Frank just watches her. She turns back to the woman, takes measured steps towards her, trying to catch her breath.

“Please, please, don't hurt me, please I have money, I'll give you whatever you want, just please let me go, please I didn't do anything!”

When Jenny finally steps into the light, she stares, shellshocked. There's no recognition in Annabella's eyes, but Jenny recognises her, even though she's been clearly worked over. She leans forward, pushes the hair away from Annabella's face, and the begging turns into wordless whimpers.

“Annabella,” she says softly. Annabella's eyes are squeezed shut, crying uncontrollably. “Look at me,” she says gently, voice soothing.

She does then, opens her eyes and looks at Jenny with something like hope. “Who are you?”

“It’s me, Jennifer.”

The hope flees at that, and Annabella jerks against the ropes binding her to the chair. “Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ. Jennifer, I’m sorry, please! He hurt me, too, he said he'd kill me, he was-”

“Tell her what you told me,” Frank's voice is low and steady, it sends chills up Jenny's spine.

Annabella's eyes dart to the shadows, and she slumps in the ropes, already broken. “I… I don't…”

“Did you know?” Jenny stands up straight. She feels like all the air has been sucked out of the room. “You couldn't _not know_ . You knew what his first wife had done just to get away from him.” Annabella sobs, struggles hard against the ropes, but there's no way she's getting out of Frank's knots. Jenny would know. “You said I'd be perfect for him _because_ you knew, didn't you?" Because she'd been just a kid, with no one to notice she was hurt or scared, no one she could turn to for help, someone he could control with fear. Someone who needed to feel loved, and would be easy to manipulate.

“Jennifer, I swear to God, Jesus please, I didn't-!”

“Tell her, Annabella,” Frank says.

Jenny turns to look at him. He's standing in the shadows, feet shoulder width apart, hands behind his back. She can't make out his face, but she sees the slight nod he gives her.

Annabella sobs hysterically. “I… I'm sorry, I... I knew. I knew you were easy meat, I knew you would fall for him, you were…” she opens her eyes, stares up into Jenny's face through snot and blood and tears. “You were so fucking young, all on your own. I knew it would be easy.”

“ _Why?_ ”

Annabella's eyes dart away, and she purses her lips shut.

“Annabella,” Frank's voice has gone soft and frightening.

“Because… because of the videos...”

Jenny is so shocked by this, she stumbles back. “What did you say?”

“He, there were videos, he liked roughing you up until you were…” _scared, hurting_ “then he'd, he'd fuck you” _rape her_ “and…”

“And what?”

Annabella shakes her head, like there's anything she could say worse than what she's already said.

“Tell her!” Jenny has never heard Frank yell before, not like this.

“There are people who pay a lot of money for that stuff. Videos.” Annabella’s eyes go glassy. “I picked you because you were young, and because Tim and I could make a lot of money selling videos of you getting...”

Videos of her getting beaten. Videos of her getting raped. Videos of her crying through the real twisted shit Tim came up with, the things he made her do, the way he liked her face bloodied up good before he fucked her, that time he used a baseball bat to…

And then his friends. No, not friends. Those guys probably paid him. They paid him to gang rape her, on _video_. They beat the shit out of her. Four broken ribs, broken clavicle, broken nose, broken jaw, broken orbital socket… There had been so much blood. So much pain. And then, the knife, and she should have died.

But she hadn't died. She'd woken up, new face, new body, no uterus, no ovaries. No Tim. No Annabella. Not until that day in the courthouse. _You got my brother arrested, you ungrateful little cunt!_ Fucking Annabella.

“I'm not gonna shoot you,” Jenny says. She barely recognises her own voice.

Annabella's sobs turn relieved, and she shakes her head, eyes screwed shut. “Thank you, thank you, I'm so sorry, Jennifer, I was scared of him, you know he was insane! He threatened me, he-”

Jenny interrupts by planting her boot on the chair between Annabella's legs and tipping her backwards. There's a snap of something, probably her wrists tied behind the chair crushed against the concrete, and then a choked scream. Jenny pulls out her SIG, turns it in her hand so she's holding it by the barrel, and straddles Annabella's chest.

Beating someone to death is different from killing someone the way Frank taught her to. The point of it is to be as _inefficient_ as possible. You're supposed to avoid the major organs. The face is okay, but watch out for the head and neck. If you break the nose too badly, she could choke on her own blood. Collar bones aren't a real danger, but the solar plexus might cause asphyxia. You can break the ribs so long as you're careful not to puncture a lung. Stay away from the heart, but the stomach can take a lot. The legs. The kidneys.

By the time Annabella is dead, Jenny is drenched in blood. Her arm is tired from swinging the SIG for so long. She's panting.

She gets to her feet, staggers a little, and turns to look at Frank. He's still standing in the shadows, but his entire body is leaning towards her.

“Good,” he says, voice low and rasping. “Good girl.”

They meet in a collision of bodies, lips and teeth and scrabbling fingers. He growls, hungry in her mouth, licks behind her teeth like he can taste her through the blood. Jenny doesn’t bother with his shirt, dried blood splatter cracking and crumbling. She shoves her hand down his pants, cups him, squeezes too hard. He bites her tongue, a warning, and she laughs into his mouth.

He spins her, pushes her up against the wall, shoves her hard. She presses her hands up against the drywall, fascinated by the blood on her knuckles, cracked open, scraped raw, bleeding pink skin. Frank seems fascinated, too. He leans forward and licks over her knuckles, tongue pink and rough against the broken skin. She moans, and he pushes his hand down the front of her pants.

“You’re wet,” he hisses, fingers squelching against her. She arches back and laughs.

“Always wet for you, Frank. Always.”

“Yeah? You hot for me girl?”

In response she presses her ass against his erection, straining against the buttons of his pants. He moans brokenly, bites down on her knuckles with a snarl.

“Do it. Fuck me.”

He pulls his hand out, pushes his fingers into her mouth. She licks herself from them as he undoes her pants one-handed, sucks them down deep, moans around them as he undoes his own pants. He grunts, then he’s pushing his cock into her, knees bent low.

When he shoves into her hard enough to push her face into the wall, she cums. It shocks them both, the ease of it, his dick so deep inside her she thinks she can feel it through her stomach. Straightened to his full height, her feet leave the ground completely, her weight pressed entirely against him and the wall, literally hanging off his cock.

“Christ, Jenny,” he whispers, thick rough hands wrapped around her waist, fingers pressing against her lower abdomen, squeezing too tight. “Jesus Christ.” His teeth come down on the side of her neck, hard enough to hurt, hard enough to make it hard to breathe. She moans, still too out of it to form words. “That’s it, girl. That’s it.” He starts driving into her then, licking the bruise on her neck, biting at her knuckles again, hands pressed so tight against her she _knows_ he can feel his own dick inside her. Every thrust pushes her face against the wall, hard enough to scrape skin, but she doesn’t care. She moans and swears, dangling helplessly in his grip, trying her best to push back against his thrusts but only managing to squirm on his fat prick instead.

“Frank,” she finally manages, hands dropping, exhausted. He moans when she slumps further against the wall, wraps one big palm across her neck half holding her up. He presses lightly, but doesn’t squeeze.

“Tell me what you want, girl.”

“I want your cum,” she pants, “I want you to choke me and fill me up.”

His fingers press hard, air supply gone, and she thinks she could cum again but he doesn’t give her the chance. He’s groaning low, grinding into her, twitching inside her as he empties his load, fingers merciless against her neck. Her vision blurs, stars popping behind her closed lids. Just when she thinks she might pass out, the fingers disappear, and air rushes painfully to her lungs, makes her cough and twitch.

He bends his knees again, carefully pulls out. Her feet back on the ground feel numb, so she keeps leaning against the wall, panting and gasping, legs shaking with her pants down around her ankles. Frank kneels behind her, fingers digging roughly into the meat of her ass.

“Bend over, girl,” he says, still breathless from his orgasm. Jenny tries her best to obey, but she’s clumsy, still unable to breathe normally. Frank pushes and guides her where he wants her, then puts his mouth on her cunt.

“Oh, fuck, fuck,” she can only whisper, voice gone hoarse.

He pushes his tongue into her, licks at his own cum, then shoves fingers alongside it and fucks hard against her g-spot. “Ask for it.”

“Make me cum,” she whines, “Jesus Christ, make me cum, Sir, make me cum, oh _fuck-_ ”

She whines low as she cums, slumps completely boneless, but his fingers follow her, drive into her relentlessly, Frank’s hands holding her hips in place so that even when she’s face down on the ground, her ass is still in his goddamn face.

She passes out.


	14. Plans

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The truth is, Jenny feels less and less like Jennifer Cesare these days, and more like Frank's shadow. His weapon. His partner.

Jenny can tell Frank is furious before she sees him, can hear him slamming the door to the brownstone, pounding up the stairs with his massive boots to pant in the doorway of their room and glare at her, fists clenched.

Jenny pauses mid-pushup, gets to her feet carefully. “Frank?”

“Something you wanna tell me, _girl_?”

Jenny’s throat goes dry. “What are you talking about?”

“The Carbone job. I fucking _trusted_ you!”

Her heart clenches and she takes a step towards him, hands held out. “Listen to me, Frank-”

He dodges her hands, steps around her to the table they take their meals on and kicks it with a roar. “You said you achieved objective! You said the mission was done!”

“Julius Carbone’s brains are still in the plaster of that wall,” she hisses, trying not to lose her temper in the face of Frank’s rage. “I did the job!”

“You left a _survivor_ , Jenny, a goddamn _witness._ ”

“She’s nobody.”

“She’s Julius Carbone’s fucking widow!”

The air crackles between them in the silence that follows. Jenny can hear her own heartbeat rushing in her ears. “He was beating on her. I saw her, I saw her face!”

Frank’s face falls, and what she sees there isn’t the disappointment she's always been afraid of seeing, it’s much worse. It’s fucking _pity_.

“You think that makes her worth saving?” His voice is rough, churning something deep and hateful in her guts. He takes two massive steps across the room and holds her face, cupping her entire head in his big hands, forehead pressed against hers like he wants to read her mind. “She’s not like you. _They’re_ not like us. These mob wives, they’re different.”

“Shut up.” Her voice croaks, and her hands pushing against his chest barely nudge him. “Shut the fuck up!”

“She knows what he does, she knows who she married! She knows how the mob does business and where the money comes from, she just ignores it! She puts on his fucking jewelry and the skanky ass dresses he buys her, drives the fancy cars and goes on his Cancun trips. Mob wives love their bad boys, their alpha dogs, they know they feed on robbery and torture and murder. They’re not like you!”

Jenny gets her knee up into his gut, and he lets go of her face finally. When she pulls back for a punch, he weaves, takes her legs out from under her. From there, it devolves. They beat the shit out of one another, they punch and kick and pin one another down, and before Jenny can really notice it, they’re tearing at each other’s clothes, and then she’s riding him in the middle of the floor, surrounded by the debris of the broken table he kicked.

He sits up with a growl, not to flip them and take control, just to wrap his arms around her waist and bite at her neck. She grabs a fistful of his hair and pulls hard, and he moans against her skin. She melts, the rage chased away by the heat and burning stretch of him inside her, scratchy pubic hair grinding against her clit.

“You don't know,” she whispers, voice humiliatingly unsteady. “You don't know anything, you don't know…”

“I know _you_ ,” he growls into her neck. “You're not like them. You're not like anyone.”

“Say it,” she groans, right on the edge, twisting her fingers sharply in his hair, fingering her own clit with her other hand.

“You're a goddess,” he rasps, voice reverent. He looks up at her, eyes dark. “You're a lioness, you're a queen.”

She sobs, shaking and coming apart, falling falling into the vastness of Frank, surrounded by him, _full_ of him. He kisses her open mouth, pulls her close, lets her ride out the wave of her climax. She loves him so much in this moment, heart brimming with it.

“Frank,” she says, sinking into his chest. It's damp, sweaty from their fight and the violent sex. She wraps her arms around him, curves them around his waist, nuzzles his chest over where she can hear his heart hammering. The soft chest hairs there tickle her cheek.

He's still hard and throbbing inside her. She doesn't even know if he's cum. He doesn't move, though, either to throw her down and keep fucking her or to pull out and watch his cum drip down her thighs. His fingers comb through her hair, run along the edge of what’s left of her shot-off ear, press softly into the pulse point under her jaw. She can't remember a time he's ever touched her so softly when she wasn't injured.

“Do I hurt you?”

Jenny pulls back to stare at him “What?”

“I can't tell with you. With us. Am I hurting you? Am I helping you? Did I kill you? Am I gonna? It's all a fucking mess.” His big hand cups her cheek. “We can't have a decent fight without fucking. Or have a decent fuck without fighting. I never thought I had it in me to be like this, that I would wanna… that I would _like_...” he sighs, drops his head to kiss at a particularly nasty bite mark on her collarbone.

“You don't have to hold back with me. I can take anything you have to give.”

“I know.”

“You're not hurting me, Frank.”

He laughs humorlessly at that, a puff of warm air against her breasts. “I wouldn't say that,” he says, smiling wolfishly as he presses his fingers into a rapidly forming bruise on her jaw from their scuffle.

Her heart sinks. He must see it on her face, because he looks up into her eyes with that sad hurt look on his face, arms tightening around her.

“I like the way we fight. I like the way we fuck.” He punctuates with a slow roll of his hips that makes her gasp softly. “I like this, I like _you_ like this, I like… What does that-? What makes me so different from scum like Tim?”

Her heart stops. For a moment, she can't breathe.

“Why do I have to hurt you like this?” It's so quiet she thinks he's talking to himself.

Jenny tangles her fingers in his poor abused hair again and tugs it back hard. He hisses, but she feels his cock twitch inside her.

“You're nothing like him,” she whispers, biting deep bruises up his neck to his ear. She sinks her teeth into the lobe and he makes a filthy sound.

“Jenny.”

“You don't fight me because you want to break me. You don't hurt me because you want to beat me down.” She lifts her hips, glides smoothly back down, fucks herself on him slow but hard. “You fight me because you know I'm gonna fight back. Because you know I _can_ fight back.”

“Christ.” He pants, hands squeezing her hips, guiding her into a faster rhythm.

“You hurt me because you know I'm gonna get back up and hurt you. Because you know I'm strong enough to take it.”

His nails dig into the skin of her back, hot sharp lines where she knows he's drawn blood. She moans.

“I'm fucked up, Frank. We both are. But this is good. This is _right_.” He nails her g-spot. She tosses her head back, lets him use her, loves the way he slams into her like he's gonna fuck her open. “Come on, Frank. Do it. Come on. Hurt me.”

His snarl sends shivers up her spine. He's close, she can tell by the way his arms twitch when he wraps them around her, pulls her face up to him and bites down on her cheek. She screams, a wail between pleasure and pain. When he pulls back, there's blood on his lips, pulled back to reveal teeth pink with it. She surges forward and licks it out of his mouth just as he cums.

 

* * *

 

The bite on her cheek blooms into a magnificent bruise, half-moon scars in the shape of Frank's teeth a weeping bleeding mess that needs butterfly bandages for a few days.

Frank looks at her with something unidentifiable sometimes.

She catches him staring when he thinks she isn't looking. Sometimes there's guilt there, sometimes discomfort. Sometimes when they fuck, he'll lick the bruise like he wishes he could bite another chunk out of her. Sometimes he looks at it with a fierce possessive pride.

They jump her mid-blowout with some bikers moving meth through some children's homes, when Frank is neck-deep in biker pleather and she's low on ammo, grappling over a shotgun with some asshole missing four front teeth. There's six of them still alive, one with a knife sticking out of his shoulder and a glazed look in his eye, one with a hand cannon he's been firing at her from behind the bar. Jenny counts off the bullets, careful to keep toothless between her and the psycho with the gun, waits until there's the clicking sound of an empty chamber before she slams the heel of her palm into his nose. His hands spasm against the shotgun, then release as he stumbles back and on his ass. She slams the butt of it into the neck of the one rushing her with a switchblade in his hands, then turns it around and blows the face off the wannabe gunman. Frank frees himself from the two at his back, snaps someone's neck with his teeth bared and his brows drawn, and she smiles to herself as she swings the empty shotgun across the cheek of the last mook standing.

She's about to turn to him, about to smirk and show him the blood on her hands, when the flash bomb rolls in through a broken window. She inhales, but doesn't manage to call out to Frank before the world explodes.

The ringing in her ears is only slightly less horrible than the blinding singe behind her closed lids. Her head is aching, tight and hard enough to make her stomach turn, and she raises a shaking hand to it, blinking rapidly and trying desperately to control her breathing. It can't be more bikers, they're brawlers, knives and baseball bats, this is someone else.

"Grab her, come on, she said to bring her back alive!"

Hands yank her up by the collar, and it's more muscle memory than anything else that gets her out of the hold, arms wrapped around the neck of someone with a knife - Jesus Christ, what the fuck is she doing with a  _fucking knife?_ \- pressed to his cheek. "Back off," she threatens hoarsely, blinking rapidly as more shapes take form and solidify. "Back the fuck off!"

Their faces are grim, and there's only four of them, but Frank is out like a light, little pool of blood expanding in slow motion under his head, the back of his head, not moving, so still...

"Who the fuck are you?" They're all pointing guns at her, and she growls at their pursed lips, hand reaching for her SIG while the other presses the knife a bit deeper into his cheek. "I said, who-?"

"Lemme shoot through him, Vito!" a kid with blown pupils and shaking hands hisses, manic and feral.

"Shut the fuck up," an older guy growls, Vito apparently. Jenny glances from one to the other, head pounding, heart pounding, and sticks the knife through the guy's face.

He screams, and someone else shoots, but Jenny's already got her SIG - just five rounds, and they'll have to fucking do - up, Vito down and the other two twitching and screaming, the guy with the knife in his face fucking tearing at it until it's just her and the scared little kid, holding his gun hand shot through the wrist, still manic, still feral, high as a fucking kite if she had to guess. He bares his teeth at her in a snarl, and she sways a little, one last bullet left in the chamber.

"Who sent you?" she rasps, hopes it sounds more threatening than exhausted.

The kid snarls some more, and she wonders how the hell he ended up on this job in the first place.

There's a groan nearby, and her eyes flicker to Frank, breath leaving her in a rush when she sees him lift his head a little, shake it as though to clear it. The relief is enough to drop her then and there, but she locks her knees and pistol-whips the kid, because they're behind and she needs to move this along before the fucking cops show up. "Who fucking sent you?!"

"Carbone!" the kid roars, spittle flying, eyes wild. "Carbone! Carbone! Carbone!"

She puts him out of his misery, grinds her teeth in frustration. Fucking motherfucking Rosalie Car-fucking-bone.

Frank stumbles into her when she helps him up, and the look in his eye tells her he heard the kid, that there's gonna be a conversation to have, but his head is bleeding and she ends up carrying most of his weight all the way back home. 

They leave the brownstone after that, move into the cellar of an old bakery that burned down in the alien attack. Jenny can't stop thinking about it. About the kid, about how badly they could have been fucked with the bikers if she hadn't been lucky, about Frank unmoving with his head bleeding out on the floor.

She'll tear Rosalie apart with her bare fucking hands before she lets her hurt Frank.

One day she takes a bottle of peroxide into the bathroom and comes out blond, and Frank looks like he's been hit in the head with a bat.

“What do you think?” She's nervous, but she straddles him in his chair and hopes he doesn't notice.

“Why?” He reaches up, tucks a stray strand of it behind her ear.

“If there's a hit out on me, I figure it can't hurt to look a little different.”

“Yeah.”

He doesn't call bullshit, but she knows he can smell it a mile off.

The truth is, Jenny feels less and less like Jennifer Cesare these days, and more like Frank's shadow. His weapon. His partner. She sweats out the last of her softness in the summer heat, writhing with him on every available surface when they're not pounding one another into the ground. They wail on each other, then fuck like animals, and it's never felt so right or good before.

The bite mark on her cheek fades, but scars. She feels the raised white skin of it, runs her fingers over it before every job. One time they hit a slavers’ brothel, and Frank takes up across the street with the rifle, while Jenny goes in to clear the scum. It's heady, knowing he trusts her to get the job done, knowing he's out there, watching over her. He doesn't miss a single shot, every bullet finding its home. When they rendezvous after she's herded the girls out and pointed them to a hospital, he runs his fingers through her blond hair and says, “Good girl.”

She loves him so much.

 

* * *

 

“What are you going to do about Rosalie Carbone?”

Jenny rolls her eyes, but doesn't pause in her sewing. “You've been asking me that all summer.”

“And you still haven't answered me, girl.”

She holds up the piece of body armour she's working on under the light. “Is the big scary skull mandatory? Bit conspicuous I think. Why do you even wear it?”

Frank is staring at her with the most unamused look she's ever seen, he is five thousand percent done with her shit right now.

She sighs, drops the armour on the table, leans forward on her elbows and looks at him. “You think we should take her out?”

“Your call,” he replies, voice flat. “That shit ain't my beef.”

Like anyone she's ever killed hasn't been Frank's beef.

“She's been dealing with Shauna Toomey,” Jenny says slowly.

Frank frowns at that. “Toomey? As in John James, that crack dealer we took out in April?”

“Shauna's his wife. His widow.”

Something like recognition dawns in his eyes. “You think they're working on something together?”

“Rosalie's been funneling Shauna's drug money into real estate, legitimising it. They've been running small amounts of cash for the past few months.”

Frank clenches his jaw. “How do you know all this?”

Jenny hesitates. “I've been looking into it on my own time.”

“How long?”

She leans back, sprawls her legs out in front of her. “Since Red gave me a heads up that Carbone had a hit on me back in June.”

He swallows, fingers clenching on the edge of the table. “Goddamnit, Jenny, thought about sharing any of this with me before they fucked us in the ass again?”

"I'm sharing now!"

"Don't be a smartass!"

She bites her tongue on a retort, inhales deeply and tries again.“I wanted to have a plan before I told you. If I didn't, you were gonna freak out on me, start buttoning me up in home base to keep me safe or something stupid like that.”

“What’s wrong with wanting to keep you safe?”

“We can't work like that, Frank. You know we can't.”

He clenches his jaw, takes a deep breath. She's gonna pay for that later, when they're sparring or fucking or performing a combination of the two.

“So I take it from your sudden chattiness that you've got a plan.”

She hesitates. “You won't like it.”

He laughs sharply at that. “I don't like any of this, girl.”

“Rosalie is the brains of the operation, but Shauna is the muscle. Apparently she used to drop bodies for John James. He kept her in check, she went where he pointed. But since he died she's been a loose cannon. She's dangerous, erratic. She's got a small circle of loyalists from her husband's day protecting her at all times. One of them’s been sleeping with her, Curtis something.”

“So?”

“So she doesn't want her men to know. They're loyal to Toomey.”

“So she goes to see Curtis alone.”

Jenny smiles.

“What do we know about Curtis?”

“Crackhead. Unreliable. Unpredictable. I know where he lives, but not much else.”

“So we exploit the weakness, watch for patterns, hit Shauna when she sneaks off to see him. What's the part I'm not gonna like?”

She hesitates. “We can't go together. You have to go on Shauna, while I move on Rosalie.”

“You're out of your goddamn mind if you think-”

“Shauna is too dangerous to risk letting her live through this. Without Shauna, Rosalie would be weakened.”

“Why does that matter if we're supposed to be hitting them both?”

“Because you're the better soldier and I-” she hesitates. She's never said this out loud before. “I need you to take her out.”

He pauses. “You're talking like you might fail objective.”

“I might. I've never done this without you. You were doing this long before you ever set foot in my diner.”

He hesitates, and she knows what he's thinking. She might do worse than fail. She might die.

“If we do Shauna before Rosalie, then we'll tip her off that we're on to the partnership. If we do Rosalie first, Shauna will wage war. We're supposed to be eliminating a problem, not creating a new one. It has to be together.”

“I'll go after Rosalie-”

“Shauna's the bigger threat.”

“Rosalie is gonna be surrounded by an army!”

“I’ve been through armies, Frank. You've taught me well.”

He makes such a face at this that Jenny has to bite back a laugh.

“You think you're gonna flatter me into letting you do this?”

“You don't need to _let_ me do anything. I'm going to go after Rosalie Carbone, and I'm asking you to help me by going after Shauna when I do. What you decide to do is up to you. But I'm not asking for your permission, _Sir._ ”

He blinks at her. She hasn't called him _sir_ in months outside the sex stuff, and it pulls him up short. She remembers promising him that she would always go where he pointed, and she really really hopes he doesn't put that promise to the test right now. Because she needs him to see her as a partner now, as _more_ than the broken empty vessel he picked up off that diner floor.

“Okay,” he says quietly, a very long time later. “Okay, Jenny. I go where you point.”

God she loves him.

 

* * *

 

“Come back to me,” he says, voice rough, just before they part ways.

“Yes, Sir,” she smirks at him, but her stomach is all ticklish after and she’s glad it’s too dark to see her blush.

Frank doesn’t smile, he just leans forward and presses a kiss to her, rough and dirty, nipping at her tongue and making her growl. “Rendez-vous at o’ three-hundred.”

“Got it. Be safe.”

She doesn’t linger when he nods and turns his back to her, doesn’t watch the shape of him, dark and impossibly large as it jogs down the alley and gets smaller and smaller before it disappears.

She just turns around and heads towards her own objective, her own target. She has work to do. She needs to take care of this thing with the Italians for good, needs to free up their attention for new targets. Frank’s been convinced something funny is going on with the Yakuza, but this has been too distracting for them to _focus_.

Frank’s got the M24. Hopefully he’ll use it, because Shauna is a crazy ass bitch if even half the kills they say are hers actually are. But she’s not going to think of Frank now. He’s a big boy, and she has her work cut out for her because Frank was right. Rosalie’s got an army on her side.

The building is only half built, most of the walls still missing and boards up in place of windows. There’s light through the cracks, and voices, and cigarette smoke. From what she can hear, there’s probably about a dozen of them in there. She eases her SIG in its holster.

 _Come back to me_.

_Focus._

There’s a dozen ways in and out of the building, but the only way to the stairs is through _that_ room. She could clear them out the old fashioned way. Or she could create a diversion.

She reaches for one of the grenades - Frank thinks she enjoys them way too much, but you know what, she’s allowed to enjoy things in life - pulls the pin, and lobs it through an empty doorway to the room next door.

The rumble is deafening, and she belatedly wonders if the structure is going to be able to survive that. Aside from blowing out the connecting wall, concrete dust fills the air, screams and a few stray bullets before someone tells someone else to _put that away before you hurt yourself, moron_. From the other side of the building, she watches as a handful of them clear out to check the room next door. She lobs the next grenade into the room on the opposite side, crouches down and runs back around to where they’ve all gathered, stepping carefully through the rubble to try and find a trace of her.

The second blast surprises them, and most of them turn around so that she finds easy targets when she finally stands up with Frank’s precious MP5. The gun is heavy and hot in her hands, a heady feeling that reminds her of sex with Frank, bursting with rounds, felling men like paper dolls.

She almost doesn’t hear the sounds of boots rushing up from the side, manages to duck back behind a jagged piece of broken wall, hand on her SIG when-

“Don’t move.”

She freezes. There’s a barrel pressed against the back of her neck. She can feel it, a little too hot because it’s been fired.

“Drop the guns.”

She hesitates, and a hammer clicks.

_If you get out alive, without having achieved objective, that's a win, because it means you can come back stronger and smarter next time and get it done._

She drops the guns, her SIG and Frank’s MP5. Man he’s gonna be so _pissed_ -

Something knocks into the back of her head, and the world goes black.


	15. Hurt

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jenny figures she’s going to die here. It’s been so long. Months maybe. Maybe a decade, she doesn’t know. She’s probably going to die here.
> 
> One day, a long time ago, an entire other person ago, she would have welcomed it. She’d wanted it. She’d secretly hoped for it every time she walked home after a late shift at the diner. Now all she can think of is how much she wishes she could see Frank one more time.
> 
> She doesn’t want to leave him alone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> READ THE TAGS GUYS.

Jenny comes to slumped in a chair. Her head is throbbing, and she can taste bile and blood. She tries to lift a hand to her face, but the rope cuts into her skin.

Ah, rope. She tests her feet, arms, legs. Her arms are tied to her sides, wrists tied behind her back, knees together, feet together. She's pretty trussed up. Whoever did this is either paranoid or just plain scared.

She lifts her head slowly, blinks a little in the light from the bare bulb. She's in some sort of basement, she thinks. No windows. She can't hear any outside sounds. It's just her in the chair, and a chair opposite hers on the edge of the circle of light.

Rosalie Carbone. She’s wearing a blue dress that’s too short and too low cut and too tight. She’s got her legs crossed, and Jenny can see her panties. Her makeup is flawless. Her hair is perfect shiny waves over one shoulder. Not a single bruise mars her features.

Jenny stares at her and waits for her to say something.

“Who are you?”

Okay, that’s a dumb question, Jenny thinks. “Sorry, lady, I’m not looking for new friends right now. I tell you what, though, we should do Pilates and fro-yo some time, see where it goes from there.”

“What’s your name?”

Jenny rolls her eyes, leans back in her chair and rolls her head from side to side. She’s _bored_.

Rosalie waits, then gets up and stands in front of her. She’s holding something. A gun. A tiny little Smith & Wesson .22, Rosalie’s entire overly-manicured hand curved around it. Jenny thinks Frank would be so pissed at her if she got killed by a .22.

“Tell me who you are,” Rosalie says, face sad and grim and angry in that way that Jenny remembers makes people stupid. At least Rosalie has a face to direct that anger to.

“Why do you even _care_?”

Rosalie holds something up then, and it catches the light. For a moment, Jenny squints at it, because she has no idea what it is, then Rosalie turns it a little between thumb and forefinger and oh. It's her wedding band. Daniel's wedding band. Jenny fumbles a little with numb fingers to feel the indent where it used to sit. It's gone. Rage boils her blood, and Rosalie smiles like she can tell.

“Because,” Rosalie sneers, “I’m going to find everyone you’ve ever loved and I’m going to make you watch as I peel the skin from their faces.”

Jenny laughs at that, blood hot, the sound high and manic to her own ears. “That was really good, very Bond-villain. You should get a cat.”

“You think this is some kind of joke?! You killed my husband, you psycho bitch!” Rosalie’s sneer is awful, hurt, confused.

“You shouldn't love him, Rosalie,” Jenny says, voice low and intent. Her ring disappears in Rosalie's hand, her wedding band, the last thing Daniel ever gave her. “I don’t care what he told you. I don’t care what any of them told you. A man who hurts you that way is not a man that you should love.”

Rosalie looks shaken, takes a step back. “Shut up, shut up! You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about! You think that piece of shit _Frank Castle_ is any better than my Julius?”

“Jealous much?” She means for it to be mocking, but it comes out as a sneer.

Rosalie laughs, a nervous laugh, steps forward again and presses the gun against Jenny’s forehead. “You’re in love with him, aren’t you? You love that goddamn psychopath. Alright then, bitch, you’re gonna tell me where he is, and I’m gonna make you watch, I’m gonna show you the inside of his fucking head!”

Jenny snarls, lunges forward in her restraints, and Rosalie squeaks and takes a step back. Jenny just laughs.

Rosalie is hysterical, gun shaking in her hand. “You’re gonna talk! I have men who can make you talk!”

“I sincerely doubt that, sweetheart.”

Rosalie’s face twists, ugly in anger, and she swings her arm back.

_Pistol-whipped. Again._

Jenny chuckles and wheezes, tongues at the tooth Rosalie knocked a little loose. She spits blood at her shiny six-hundred dollar pumps.

_Her wedding band is gone._

“Come on, little girl,” Jenny says, showing her a bloody smile that makes Rosalie take another step back. “That all you got?”

If she ever makes it out of this, Frank will probably beat the shit out of her for that bravado.

Rosalie goes to town.

 

* * *

 

Jenny can’t remember how long she’s been here. Days, probably. Maybe a week. There’s no light source except for the bare bulb, permanently on and buzzing over her head. There are no sounds she can hear. A handful of men come in and out, sometimes asking her for her name, but most of them just want to know where Frank is. Where the Punisher is. They break a couple of fingers, dig a little penknife under her fingernails and _snap snap snap_ them right off, but really. They just don’t seem to be _trying_.

There's a sadistic bastard with a knife, and she stares right at him, keeps her gaze fixed on his watery blue eyes while he runs the knife over the soft tissue of her thighs and belly, the undersides of her breasts. She shudders when he presses it into the skin, but doesn't make a sound, doesn't look away, barely beven blinks. His hands shake after the fourth entry wound, and he leaves, unnerved, to rave outside the door against the shrill high voice of Rosalie Carbone, screeching against her pain.

Jenny stares at nothing, bleeds silently into the very depths of the sharp cold memory, and waits.

That's when they come in and rape her. Maybe ten or a dozen of them, she doesn’t count, because they’re morons and they untie her legs to do it. She figures she’s knocked out maybe six of them before they get her down on the cold stone floor. It takes three of them to hold her down, even with the ropes around her arms and wrists. She thinks of Tim's faceless corpse in some piss soaked alley and she laughs when they fuck her because they don’t know the meaning of the word _torture_.

Her wedding band is _gone_.

“You can’t rape a girl if she can’t feel your tiny prick, asshole,” she laughs at one, smiling cheeky as she can with half her face swollen.

They don’t try that again.

 

* * *

 

Things after that seem blurry, faded. She thinks she keeps passing out. She’s really hungry. The places the rope digs into her skin feel raw from scabbing and peeling off over and over again. She doesn’t really sleep, they don’t let her sleep. They keep asking her her name, which she ignores, and she never sees her wedding band again.

“What’s your name?” Rosalie is standing a distance away, far enough from the blood and piss on the floor not to get her pretty shoes dirty.

Jenny laughs. She's naked and bleeding and basically made of bruises, and Rosalie is wearing _makeup_. She can’t focus on the outline of Rosalie's perfectly red mouth. The light feels dim and grey, even though she remembers thinking it was so bright before. “Last name Jass. First name Hugh.”

“Where’s Castle?”

“You’re a real dumb bitch, Rosalie, anyone ever tell you that?”

Rosalie makes a sound of disgust, and Jenny tilts her head back, stares up at the ceiling.

“Bet your precious Julius did. Tell me, Rosalie, do you miss him?”

“Do whatever you have to do, _make her talk_ ,” Rosalie snaps to one of the men, stomps out of the room.

They start the water torture then, and yeah, it’s bad. It’s worse than the fingers thing, or the nails snapping off, it’s worse than the beatings and the hunger and the sleep deprivation.

It's worse than the rape.

Jenny figures she’s going to die here. It’s been so long. Months maybe. Maybe a decade, she doesn’t know. She’s probably going to die here.

One day, a long time ago, an entire other person ago, she would have welcomed it. She’d wanted it. She’d secretly hoped for it every time she walked home after a late shift at the diner. Now all she can think of is how much she wishes she could see Frank one more time.

She doesn’t want to leave him alone.

Frank would be so disappointed in her. The thought makes her heart sink so she doesn’t even have the energy to laugh at them anymore. She just stays quiet, falls back into old habits, swallows down the pain and remembers what it felt like to know it was never going to end.

 

* * *

 

The whole rescue thing is very muddled for Jenny. She isn’t really awake at this point, but she’s not much for sleeping either these days. The commotion going on outside the door doesn’t fully register, mostly because she’s so out of it. Eventually though, everyone drawing guns and a bunch of guys running out of the room tips her off that something wonky is going on.

She starts laughing again, but it sounds pretty bad and her throat feels really funny. She keeps laughing though because it’s not a mocking laugh, it’s not laughing in these pricks’ faces because they think there’s anything left in her to break. She laughs because it’s Frank, and he’s walking into this trap like he could possibly be unaware it _is_ a trap, and she’s going to kill him when she sees him. She laughs because she’s at least going to see him one last time, and that makes her happier than she remembers being in a long long time. It would be pretty embarrassing, really, if she weren't naked in her own filth and piss and blood.

When the door gets kicked in, the first thing that happens is the light goes out. There’s a lot of commotion after that, some shooting, but Jenny’s blind. Without the constant dull light of that bare bulb, it’s pitch black in the room. How the hell can Frank see in this?

When it goes quiet, there are hands on her wrists, yanking at the knots in the rope, but there’s way too much blood and water in it to come apart. “Gotta cut ‘em,” she rasps. “Gotta cut…”

The hands disappear, and for the first time since she’s woken up in this chair she’s terrified. She’s alone, in the dark, she’s alone and she’s pretty sure she’s about three minutes away from a full on implosion or something, because she starts gasping for air and she’s dizzy, dizzy in the dark, she’s alone and Frank…

“Frank?” It’s a sob. She’d be humiliated if she weren’t terrified.

“He’s close by, just hold still.”

That’s not Frank. Jenny hangs her head and shivers violently as the hands reappear, gloved, not big enough to be Frank’s hands. The ropes around her wrists disappear, and the rush of blood to broken fingers hurts so much. She hisses through clenched teeth, still unable to make the hurt sounds they’ve spent the last however long trying to beat out of her.

She thinks it’s probably Daredevil cutting her out of her ropes. Everything hurts. Everything is slow and dry and cracked open, she’s bleeding from a dozen spots she can’t even remember being hit in. The dark is oppressive, she can’t breathe.

Daredevil - it’s probably Daredevil, right? - cups her elbows and gets her to her feet. She stumbles a little, bare feet shuffling uselessly. His body armour is pressed against her naked chest, hard and unyielding and stiff. She misses Frank. She _needs_ Frank.

“Frank,” she sobs again, a pathetic sound, a mewling weak cry that she feels so ashamed of. “It’s a trap, please, Frank, please…”

“We know. Come on, I’ll get you to Frank,” he says, dragging her with him, carrying most of her weight. His voice sounds rough. He doesn’t seem really happy about having to do this. “Just stay with me.”

She most certainly does not _stay with him_.


	16. Damage

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She was worse than nobody, she was some angry rudderless existence waiting for someone to kill her because she was too big a waste to do it herself.
> 
> But she isn’t anymore. She’s somebody now. She’s Frank’s weapon, his backup, his eye in the sky, his gun hand, his field medic, his sparring partner, his…
> 
> Just fucking his.

Jenny wakes up all at once, gasping and fighting to sit up.

“Whoa whoa, hey relax, calm down!”

There are hands on her shoulders, pushing her back down. She tries to focus on the face they're attached to.

“Where-?”

That's all she manages to get out before she's spewing her guts out, the woman with the hands patting her back and pressing something cold to the back of her neck. Jenny winces when she's done, because that's a lot of puke for someone who's had nothing to eat in a while.

“My name is Claire,” the woman says, wiping at Jenny's mouth with a wet cloth. “We're in a safehouse or whatever.” She sighs, shakes her head with something like disbelief. “I can't believe this is my life now.”

Jenny's eyes dart around the space. It isn't a safehouse she's been in before, but it looks like someplace Frank would choose.

But she doesn't really trust what the woman is saying, either. She figures this could be a really elaborate trick, even though it's never been harder for Jenny to think straight before. She looks at the woman and doesn't say anything, taking in her face, tired but kind. Pretty. No makeup. Dressed in… scrubs.

“You a doctor?”

“Let's say yes,” the woman - Claire - says with a sarcastic smile Jenny doesn't understand.

“Who pulled me out?”

“M-Daredevil.”

“M-Daredevil.”

Claire shakes her head a little. “This whole vigilante thing takes getting used to. What's your name?”

Jenny grits her teeth, laughs a little. Definitely a trick. Probably. If it is, it's probably going to be what finally sends her over the edge. She's patched up, she can feel bandages… basically everywhere. But she's not hurting. Drugged, then.

“Where's Rosalie?”

“Don't know.”

She narrows her eyes which are basically swollen shut anyway. Claire seems unimpressed.

“One of the terms of my continued involvement in this shit is that I don't wanna know.”

Jenny has a scathing remark to say to that, but she keeps her mouth shut.

“Listen,” she shifts forward a little, puts a cold compress against the side of her face that throbs more. “You're looking pretty rough, and from what I've seen, you're plenty used to rough. You have a lot of old scars. Stitches are pretty good, but not really the kind that care about leaving marks. Looks like a field medic or something, if I had to guess.”

Jenny waits.

“Still. No matter what kind of rough you're used to, this is… you were assaulted pretty viciously. There was… you had vaginal bleeding, anal tearing. The… he didn't use a condom.”

“One of them did,” Jenny says. “Said he didn't wanna catch whatever nasty shit his buddies had.”

Claire's lips twist at that. “I took some blood for… to test for diseases. The results should come back in a few days.” She hesitates, and Jenny clenches her jaw and holds her gaze. “I think you should talk to someone.”

Talk to someone. Fucking  _talk to someone._ “Like over Pilates and fro-yo?”

“I take it you're being sarcastic.”

“Nooo.”

Claire curses, rubs at her eyes tiredly with the heels of her palms. “Goddamn vigilantes.”

“I don't need to talk to anybody. Those assholes were amateurs.” She turns her head a little, stares up at the ceiling. “I'm fine.”

“Yeah, of course you are.” Claire gets up, takes the bucket of vomit with her, muttering about assholes that think they're invincible. Jenny considers making a run for it. If this is a trick, there's probably mooks outside. But she's untied. Naked and unarmed, sure, but Frank taught her to be dangerous that way.

She throws the blanket off herself and sits up slowly. She thinks she's got a broken rib or three. It's been carefully wrapped, like whoever did it gave a shit. From there, getting to her feet is easier.

“If you tear one of my stitches, I swear to God I will make you regret it.”

She glares at Claire, who's standing in the doorway to a bathroom, looking totally done with her shit.

“She means it,” a voice says from behind her, amused.

Jenny sits back down right before her legs give out. “You get yourself an eyeful, Red?”

He huffs, walks around the trundle bed she's sitting on to sit in the chair Claire vacated. Okay. Not a trick then.

“You're more bandages than skin right now.” He doesn't smile, but he isn't frowning or scowling or growling at her, and it's new. He looks younger, even though he looks more worn than ever.

“You don't look so hot neither.”

Claire snorts at that, and his lips press together into a thin line.

“Castle nearly tore up Hell's Kitchen trying to find you.”

Her heart lurches at that. “How long have I… has it been?”

“Eight days since they took you. It took him two to ask for help.”

“You helped him?”

“I helped you.”

“You don't know me.”

“I know if I didn't, he would have stopped at nothing to get you back.” He tilts his head a little, like he’s looking at something weird floating in his soup. “Who _are_ you?”

“I’m nobody.”

“You’re lying.”

Yeah. Yeah, she is. She used to think that, believe it. She wasn’t anybody at all. She was worse than nobody, she was some angry rudderless existence waiting for someone to kill her because she was too big a waste to do it herself.

But she isn’t anymore. She’s _somebody_ now. She’s Frank’s weapon, his backup, his eye in the sky, his gun hand, his field medic, his sparring partner, his…

Just fucking _his._

“Take me to Frank.”

“I should be taking you into custody.”

“But you didn’t, and you’re not. I… I need Frank.”

They stare at one another. The reflective lenses in his mask show her tiny red images of herself looking like shit. She wouldn't listen to her either.

“Tell me why you're doing this.” She can't figure out what she hears in his voice, but Claire shifts from one foot to the other.

“I'm gonna give you a name,” she says, voice soft.

“Okay,” he seems a little confused, but it's hard to tell through the mask.

“Daniel Alves.”

“Who is he?”

Jenny smiles humorlessly. “Figure it out.”

He clenches his jaw, then nods like she's challenged him. “Okay. I'll figure it out. I'll figure _you_ out.”

She laughs a little. It hurts her ribs. She feels dangerously close to a precipice she's too afraid to examine. “I need to see him,” she says, voice gone hoarse and dry. She’d beg right now if he said no, because this is it for her. She’s reached beyond the limit of her dignity, which after everything that happened...

He tilts his head a little, like he’s listening to something. Jenny strains her ears. “I left him a message. He’s already on his way here.” He stands up, turns to Claire. “Come on, better we aren't here when he arrives.”

Claire sighs again, starts packing away a really big medical kit, but hesitates, glancing at Daredevil standing all the way by the door. "Come to the roof of Metro General in four days, and I'll give you your test results. Think about what I said, and... I'll listen, if you change your mind about talking to someone.” With that, she's gone, they're both gone.

Jenny doesn’t think about it, she just tries to sit up, because if he’s right, if Frank is coming…

Her legs don’t work. She stumbles, ends up on her hands and knees. Everything is tired and weak, and she can almost feel the wave of pain held at bay with whatever professional-grade painkillers Claire gave her. She can’t let him see her like this, she can’t be naked and on her knees when he…

“Jenny!”

She’s pathetic. She’s so weak and pathetic. She wants him to find her triumphantly standing over the corpse of Rosalie Carbone, maybe beat up a little to get him going, get him to fuck her right there in the same room, but this…

“Christ, Jenny, fuck, Jesus  _Christ_ , girl."

His hands flutter, like he doesn’t know where to hold her that isn’t covered in a bandage. She lifts her head to blink at him, his face basically as bruised and fucked up as hers is, a rictus of worry and pain.

_He’s so fucking beautiful._

“You should see the other guys,” she jokes weakly, and his face does something between relief and anger. It makes her laugh. No wait, never mind. That’s not laughing, that’s definitely crying.

He pulls her to him, gathers her into his lap, holds her against him. He doesn’t seem to give a shit about her bandages now, just holds her close, tight enough to hurt the broken rib or ribs or whatever else is fucked up in her own body. She’s dizzy with him, the smell and feel of him she thought she had lost forever.

“I didn’t tell them anything,” she sobs, hysterical and too weak and hurt to stop. “I didn’t tell them anything, I swear.”

His arms tighten at that, and his breathing sounds a little fucked up. “I know,” he says, voice way too hoarse. “I know you didn’t, girl. It’s okay, I’ve got you now.” _He’s crying_ , Helpful Mind offers. _He’s crying for you._

It just makes Jenny cry harder.

 

* * *

 

For weeks, Jenny recovers. The first few days are agony interspersed with swathes of disbelief that it ever really happened. Or that it ever really ended. She surprises herself by having nightmares that leave her shaking and clawing for air. Frank holds her tight when she does, even when she's doing all she can to get away. The bruising and the swelling and the other shit disappears fast, the stitches come out, but the broken ribs slow her down and the nightmares get worse.

Frank won’t spar with her. But he does try to fuck her one time, and Jenny has to remember what Claire said, about the blood test and the guys not using condoms, and she puts her hand against his chest and says, “Wait, stop.”

He stills immediately, pulling back to look at her with his brow creased, face pinched with worry. “Am I hurting you?”

Her heart thumps unevenly, and she swallows because no matter how rough they are, how much they beat on each other, he would never lay a finger on her if she just said _stop_.

“No, it’s…” she curls her fingers against his chest hair, staring at the pale strip of skin where her wedding band used to be. “I might not be clean anymore.”

For a moment, he looks confused, then his face slips into a terrifying blank expression that makes her drop her gaze. “Why wouldn’t you be clean anymore?”

Jenny doesn’t wanna tell him. She doesn’t wanna say it. “Some of Rosalie’s guys they… they were trying to get me to talk.”

Claire thinks she needs to talk to someone about this. But she can’t talk to Frank about it. She can’t-

“What did they do?” Frank’s voice is low and dangerous.

Jenny shakes her head, stares at his dogtags.

He cups her chin, digs his fingers into the really bad bruises there and lifts her head up so she’s looking at him. “Tell me what they did, girl.”

“They..." Her voice cracks, and she swallows. "They fucked me."

She can't tell what the look on his face is.

“They raped you.”

Jenny feels sick. Her throat swells shut and she closes her eyes.

Frank’s fingers tighten on her chin. She winces, but he doesn’t let up.

“How many?”

She shrugs a little. “Don’t know.”

“ _Guess_.”

She takes a deep breath. There are tears pricking the backs of her eyes when she opens them. “Ten. Twelve, maybe. I couldn’t keep track. I couldn’t tell if they were taking turns or going again or…”

The tears spill. Frank leans forward, places soft kisses over where the scar from his bite is hidden in a bruise. He kisses up to her eyelids, licks away the tears from her lashes. “I’m gonna kill them all." His voice is cold and low, a growl hidden beneath an inferno, a slight tremor in it that undoes her completely. "I’m gonna set them on fire and watch them burn alive. I’m gonna string them up by the guts and hang them from the fucking trees.”

“Frank.” She doesn’t know what to say. She reaches for him with shaking hands and cups the sides of his neck, taut with straining tendons against her broken splinted fingers and the bandaged fingertips where she doesn’t have any fingernails anymore.

“Tell me what they did.”

“No, no,” she cries, she openly cries, sobs and she can’t stop. Something in her has come back damaged, something inside her is all fucked up. She hasn’t been able to stop crying since he found her again, since Claire and Red and…

Frank cradles her against his chest. He presses her cheek over his heart, hammering against her ear, and runs gentle but callused fingers through her hair until the sobbing becomes soft whimpering.

“Tell me, Jenny. I need to know.”

“ _Why_?”

“Because if I don’t know, I’m going to picture it, and the things I’m picturing…” His fingers tighten a little on her hair, an involuntary act that he soothes with that gentle touch again.

They can't be worse, can they? Whatever he's picturing?

“Tell me.”

So Jenny tells him. In broken sentences, she tells him. Tells him about the guy whose dick she nearly bit off before they decided to stay away from her teeth. The one who stood on her head. The first one who decided to stick it in her ass with nothing but spit and spunk and a lot of blood to ease the way in. The one who tried to shove his whole hand in, but got impatient at four fingers and just fucked her instead. The one who put his Beretta inside her and asked if this was how Frank fucked her. She tells him she laughed at them all, derided them, made fun of their tiny dicks and pitied their poor girlfriends until they gave up and left. She doesn’t tell him that she could feel their spunk inside her for days after. Doesn’t tell him that the water torture made it easier to hide the shaking and the tears that came over her then.

But she does tell him that it was the water that finally shook her. It's the water she feels when she has the nightmares. With her mouth stretched wide around the towel they’d taped into her mouth, without the ability to mock them or laugh, with the air going damp and wet and her lungs hurting _hurting_ as they screamed for air, silently because she suffered silently, must always suffer silently… Something inside her broke.

Frank holds her for hours when she’s done, when the words have run dry and only the sobs remain. He doesn’t say anything, just lets her fall asleep against him, exhausted by the tears and the memories and Frank’s unwavering heart steady in his chest.

She wakes up to him destroying the bakery upstairs, roaring wordlessly with the splinters of a chair leg in his hands, chunks of broken furniture wedged into the walls and the debris of his rage scattered across the floor. She sits on the top step of the stairs, shaking and tearless, and her heart fucking breaks.

The tests come back positive for chlamydia and gonorrhea, and the news comes with a sympathetic look and a bag of antibiotics Claire hands her with instructions. All things considered, it could be much worse, but Frank looks worse than stricken when she explains to him that they have to wait seven days after she finishes the treatment before they can have sex again.

“Glad to know my pussy is so addictive,” she tries to joke, but Frank just swallows and keeps cleaning his sidearm.

It hurts her that he’s so hurt. It hurts the stupid ugly thing in her chest, the thing that’s gotten infected and tender after Rosalie’s animals got their hands on her. She can’t decide what’s worse, the fact that Frank has to know what they did to her, or the fact that he knows it hurt her so much.

Frank doesn’t kiss her, barely touches her anymore. Even after the antibiotics and the seven days and the second test Claire did for her, he just stays away. He goes to sleep beside her on his side, massive back turned to her like the world’s largest fence. Jenny has no idea how to climb over it. She rubs at the indent in her ring finger obsessively and quietly falls apart.

She’s leaving the hospital after her third and final blood test with Claire when Red shows up outside and says, “Jennifer Rachel Alves.”


	17. Jagged

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There are jagged edges to her, she thinks, new cracks and nicks that span across parts of her Daniel had healed, and Frank had strengthened. They snag on the frayed edges of her consciousness, leave her buzzing and restless until she thinks she'll go insane.

She’s leaving the hospital after her third and final blood test with Claire when Red shows up outside and says, “Jennifer Rachel Alves.”

“Jenny,” she says to him. “Just Jenny.”

He lowers his chin. “Your first husband, Tim Buccato. He was found beaten to death in an alley with his pants around his ankles.”

Jenny shrugs, smiling a little. “Hell’s Kitchen is a dangerous place.”

Daredevil purses his lips so hard an open cut starts bleeding. “You killed him.”

“No one was sorry to see him go,” she says, amused, not bothering to correct him. “Do you know everything about me now?”

“I know you were emancipated at sixteen, married by eighteen. I know Tim Buccato went to Rikers for six years on an aggravated assault with a deadly weapon charge, and that you were listed as the victim.”

“Don’t call me that,” she says, anger simmering under her skin. “I’m nobody’s victim.”

He lifts his head up at that, like he’s taking her in. “No,” he says, “not anymore. But there were pictures in that file.”

“Pictures of me?”

“Yeah. I didn't-” he breaks off, laughs a little with something like bitterness. “I didn't look at them. The medical report was graphic enough.”

“I turned out alright.”

“Where did you disappear to? For years after your last hospital discharge, you fell off the face of the Earth. Nothing until your second marriage license.”

Jenny shrugs irreverently. “Lived on the streets for a little while.”

He looks stricken at that. “And then Daniel Alves got shot.”

She smiles sadly, but doesn't say anything. For some reason, she is reminded of the first time Frank learned all this about her. She doesn’t even know why she told him Daniel's name, why she wanted him to know her. Except she knows Frank respects him, even if he won't say it. She even thinks she kind of respects him, and so part of her wants him to respect her, too.

Everything before the diner feels like eons ago. She never really wondered what the world thought happened to her, though. “What do the records say about me now?”

He hesitates, then confesses, "Nothing."

No. They wouldn't, with no one to report her missing or notice she was gone except maybe a landlord who wouldn't give a shit.

“Yeah,” she laughs again. “Yeah. I think… I think that works for me.”

“You killed Buccato’s sister too, didn’t you?”

“Hey that reminds me,” she says, snapping her fingers. “If you get bored sometime and wanna kill a few hours, there’s apparently some sort of rape video market going on.”

“Jesus,” he says, shakes his head a little. “Shit, Jennifer.”

“Just Jenny,” she says again. “Tim and Annabella were the last people to call me Jennifer, and if I ever find out where they’re buried, I’ll take a piss on their graves.”

“Let me help you,” he says, looking lost.

“Help me piss on their graves?”

“Help you get your life back together!”

“I don’t need your help. I’m not a victim, remember? I don’t need anyone's help.”

“So Frank Castle isn’t your tour guide on some massive revenge spectacle of your tormentors?”

“You have no idea what Frank Castle is to me.” Her hands clench into fists. She’s still recovering, still not back to her fighting best, but that’s not gonna stop her from kicking his ass.

He makes a shocked face that looks almost comical with the horns on his head. “Holy shit, you're not-?”

“Don't say something that's gonna make me shove my boot up your ass, man.”

He shakes his head, shoulders high up by his ears. “Do you really think this is what Daniel would have wanted for you?”

“Of course it isn't what he wanted for me,” she is dismayed to hear how sad she sounds. “No. Daniel was… Daniel would never have wanted this for me. But Daniel's gone. He's _gone_ , Red, and I'll never be the girl that he fell in love with ever again.”

“So you take up with the _Punisher_?”

“No it's… Frank is…” _Everything. Everything in the world that still exists._

“He’s a _mass murderer_.”

“He’s strong, and kind, and fearless. He's a soldier fighting a war he can't win, but fighting it anyway because he knows it needs to be done. He fed himself into the ugliest, shittiest parts of this city to do it and _he didn't flinch_. They call you the Man Without Fear, because you jump off rooftops and run into gunfights with your bare hands, but you’re not. You’re not fearless, you’re _a coward_. You're scared of what's underneath the preaching and the platitudes about the sanctity of human life. You're afraid if you slip, just the one time, you’re not going to be able to stop. You’re not better than Frank, you’re not better than _me_. You're just a coward too afraid of the monster inside him to step up and face it.”

He swallows, and the silence stretches. “So you’ve got me all figured out?” His sarcasm is biting, but there’s a hint of something underneath that she knows has struck close to home.

“Yeah. And I didn’t need your name or your history to do it.”

There aren’t any words left after that, but when Jenny stomps back to home base, she marches right up to Frank, slaps the Chinese takeout container from his hand, and growls, “Is it because I’m damaged?”

He blinks at her, at the spilled chowmein, then frowns and says, “ _What_?”

“Do I disgust you now? No good after I’ve been fucked up by all those guys?”

He makes the stupidest, most oblivious face she's ever seen and it makes her want to hit him, but she can't do that, she can't hit him if he _won't hit back._

“I'm nobody’s victim, Castle. Those bastards aren't gonna make one of me, and neither are you, you hear me? So if you think-”

“What the _fuck_ are you talking about?”

“You don't want me anymore!”

It comes out all high-pitched and hysterical, and any minute now her heart is going to climb up her fucking throat.

Frank continues to look stupid and oblivious, then, “Are you _insane_?!”

He grips her by the jaw, pushes her back against the table so she's trapped against him.

“You think I don't want you because those sons of bitches hurt you? You think I don't want you anymore because you're _damaged_?” He's looking at her with that fire and anger and hunger, and Jenny is speechless and dwarfed by it. She thinks he's going to kiss her, but then he falters, fingers relaxing their grip. He looks at her with that disbelieving look on his face, like he can't figure her out, and she wonders when she got to be such a great mystery. “I didn't wanna- I _don't_ wanna hurt you. I know we talked about it, about the way we are when we fuck, but that was before-”

He chokes, looks away. Jenny puts her hands up, slides them across his chest. His heart is racing.

“You were gang raped by fucking mobsters. Tortured, for _days_. And me, I can't- I can't do the things I do to you and not wonder if they- if you're thinking of _them_ and what _they_ did to you, the way _they_ hurt you. So no, Jenny, it isn't because you're damaged. It's because _I'm_ damaged. Because I want you _too much_. Do you understand?”

She doesn't answer, just surges up and kisses him. He groans into her mouth, practically trembling from how still he's holding.

“I want you to touch me,” she says, and she remembers their first time. “I've wanted you for so long.”

“What if you- what if I’m too much, what if I-?”

“Then I'll tell you, and you'll stop,” she interrupts, biting his lip and tugging, making him groan and pull her closer. “You're never too much. It's you. You're Frank. You're not going to hurt me like they did.”

He laughs a little, disbelieving, shaking his head, then finally _finally_ kisses her. He kisses her for real, leaves her breathless, hands everywhere. When they break apart they're both panting, and Jenny has fresh scratch marks down the side of her neck.

Frank looks at them, then growls, “Turn around.”

He bends her over the table, fucks her like that, hands tight on her wrists to hold her down, mouthing down her back leaving teeth marks and bruises.

It's good. It's _right_.

 

* * *

 

She knows Frank has been going out to gather information on Rosalie Carbone. He doesn’t mention the name around her anymore, though, like he thinks just hearing it is gonna send her over some fragile edge. He kisses the place where her ring used to be apologetically, but that's as close as they get to bringing any of it up again.

She doesn't ask him if he's been following her again when she's out on her own. Sometimes she thinks she can feel him, just out of sight while she lingers outside bars and picks fights with men twice her size. There are jagged edges to her, she thinks, new cracks and nicks that span across parts of her Daniel had healed, and Frank had strengthened. They snag on the frayed edges of her consciousness, leave her buzzing and restless until she thinks she'll go insane.

The fact that Shauna is dead doesn’t even come up. She has to read about it in a newspaper, and it makes her burn with shame. Her first mission, _her_ mission, not one of Frank’s missions that she backed him up on. She failed so royally. Their intensity, whether in fighting or fucking or even just long silences spent meticulously field stripping every weapon in Frank’s considerable arsenal, doesn’t waver. If anything, it multiplies, becomes an almost palpable third presence with them all the time until Frank takes her to an underground bare knuckle boxing ring.

“What the hell is this?”

“The fucking circus,” he grouses, and she scowls until he gives her an easy smirk. “Training.”

“Really?” She eyes the huddled fighters, the filthy mat.

“Yeah.” He reaches for her jacket then, and she lets him take it, still a little confused. “We need to up your hand to hand. Come on, I signed you up for the starter's tournament. Five grand for the winner. Think you can hack it?”

Her heart races, and she grins, showing him her teeth. “Yes, Sir.”

The fighting is the first time she's felt like a person again in weeks. She's slow, but she picks it up fast, the way he says she picks up everything fast, and she laughs while she does it. It unnerves her opponents, her bloody smile, her tiny fists scarred and bleeding, the visible bullet hole through her right shoulder.

She wins the five grand.

“You're different,” Frank says again that night, dabbing at her fat lip with a proud smile on his face. “Stronger. Faster. Ruthless.”

“Do you like me like this?” she asks, an echo of so long ago she almost can't remember a time before.

“ _Yes_.” He leans forward then and licks the blood from her lips.

They go to the cemetery again, and give each other some space this time because honestly, Jenny isn’t sure she could face the graves of his wife and children knowing that she’s put him in the crosshairs of a sad broken woman because she let her own issues cloud her judgment.

Daniel’s grave doesn’t seem as abandoned as it did the first few times she came here for some reason. Idly, she wonders if Red's been here, maybe in a suit or something because he seems like the type to put on a suit to visit a grave. Jenny traces her fingers through the engraving of Daniel's name on the headstone and feels like smiling or crying or both. She presses a kiss to her fingertips instead, then presses them into the ground. She hopes he knows, she hopes he understands. She misses him so much, but she doesn’t think he’d recognize her if her saw her right now. Not just because of the short blonde hair or the shape and strength of her body. She doesn’t think he’d be happy if he knew what she’d become, but Daniel was always kind and forgiving beyond the scope of what she herself ever understood.

That night Frank fucks her up against the wall, rough peeling paint chips scraping against her back. It’s hard and deep and a little painful, but it's slow, almost hesitant. She wraps her arms and legs around him and stares into his eyes, seeing the same wonder and sadness and resignation in them that she knows he sees in hers. Maria and Daniel, two of the most beautiful wonderful people to ever live, gunned down unfairly, too soon, because of a city that’s let the worst parts of humanity run rampant. No, they would not approve.

But Frank understands, and Jenny understands. Sadness is not regret, there is no room for regret in their lives. Resignation is not despair. If anything, they’re a burning beacon of _hope_. Hope that by giving themselves over to what they’ve become, what the city has turned them into, they are finally equipped to face it. They know there will be no room for them in the new world they're trying to create, no room for monsters and soldiers and broken pieces of a forgotten whole in a place of peace. No room for them in a world where wives and children don't get shot in the middle of Central Park. No room for them in a place where children with guns don't commit murders to save sick grandmothers. They both know that. They stare into one another like they’re staring into the abyss. The abyss has looked back at them, and found them worthy.

They’re going to save this city.

 

* * *

  
Most of the fingernails don’t grow back. That’s what Jenny is thinking about when October rolls around again, and she finds herself standing across the street from the diner where it all began. It’s gone, of course, turned into a McDonald’s because what the fuck else would it be.

At least it isn’t a goddamn Starbucks.

Jenny puts a cigarette between her teeth, lights it. It’s even colder this year than the last, she thinks. Must be a lot of homeless guys looking for a place they can stretch a buck or two into a half hour of not freezing out here. She hopes someone is giving them soup and coffee, because out here is the cold and the dark, and it can sweep into any well-lit space at any moment and end a girl’s life.

Daredevil doesn’t announce himself, just sort of appears beside her, hidden in shadows.

“Filthy habit, that. Those things could kill you,” he says, and she snorts because-

“Damn, Red, is that a joke?”

“I joke,” he protests, a little bit of a whine in his voice. “Sometimes.”

Jenny laughs some more around her cigarette, lets the silence settle. She’s come to like Red, she thinks, when he’s not doing the whole wailing and gnashing of teeth routine anyway.

“What do you have for me?”

Jenny hesitates, buys herself time by inhaling deeply and holding the smoke in her lungs. “You ever heard of something called the Chaste?”

Quiet. Then, “No.”

“Don't lie to me, Red.”

He huffs a little, guilty or just embarrassed he got caught. “Fine. I've heard of them, but their involvement in New York has ended.”

“Not what I hear.” She drops the cigarette, steps on the cherry with the worn toe of her boot. “They're buying up a building.”

“A building? Where?”

“On 43rd, across from the orphanage.”

The pause this time is too long. “The orphanage?”

“Yeah,” Jenny looks away back at the McDonald's. “Saint Agnes, you know it?”

“I know it.”

He's breathing heavily and she can practically feel the tension vibrating through him. She thinks she's probably just put together a little bit more about him, but she doesn't care about who he is when the mask comes off. She knows this is the real him, the mask, the horns, the Devil. The other guy, the one who puts on a suit to visit a grave, _he's_ the real mask.

“Your turn. Give me something.”

Red takes a deep breath. “Rawlins. Former CIA. Running drugs from Afghanistan.” She doesn't quite turn to him, but she does turn into the shadows when he says, “Rumours say he killed his wife because she figured out his side job.”

“You seem to think I have a type. You trying to tell me something?”

“I think more people should defend those unable to defend themselves in this city.”

“That what you think I do? What Frank does?”

“In your own way.” He turns to her then, like he can look her in the eye even through the shadows. “Doesn't mean someone doesn't need to defend it from _you_.”

She laughs at that, turning to leave. They don't need more words.

 

* * *

  
Frank latches onto the idea of Rawlins with almost no convincing. Jenny rolls her eyes at his oblivious face and pretends not to notice how much he's trying to distract her from Rosalie Carbone. As if someone like him could just let go of what happened to her. As if _she_ could.

He teaches her knife fighting, finally, her childish fear lost in the deep roar of her newfound rage. Her hands are steady,  and he grins and laughs and calls her _good_. She's holding her own, more than holding her own. When they spar, she realises both of them are holding back now, because if they don't, they'll probably kill one another.

The thought makes her warm and proud in the weak pathetic part of her chest, still jagged, still damaged, but just a little less tender.

She goes to more fighting rings, mostly with Frank, sometimes on her own. It helps, reminds her she's still strong, reminds her who she was becoming before Rosalie Carbone derailed her fucking sense of self.

Frank gives her a Glock 17 to use now that her SIG and his MP5 are gone. She hopes whichever one of Rosalie's goons decided to keep her gun as a souvenir shoots himself in the nuts with it. When she tells him how much she hates the Glock he promises to find her another SIG as soon as he can, then comes back to her with a Desert Eagle Mk 19 that she instantly falls in love with. She cups it in her tiny hands, feels the strength of it, the sheer weight of its power through her entire arm and grins wildly at him.

“You think you can handle the recoil on that?” He says it with a smile and a challenging spark in his eyes, but he's distracted and sad, and she knows he's thinking about Rosalie Carbone again.

She distracts him, too, getting on her knees for him or sitting on his face when he gets that someone-kicked-my-puppy look. Yeah, she's pretty obvious about distracting him, too.

And he lets her, just as much as she lets him. Their relationship is a strange tiptoe between brutal ugly honesty and quiet allowances for a false privacy.

When he thinks she's asleep he traces the rough tips of her fingers where the nails used to be, and kisses the scarred white knuckles of her hands. They're still small, her hands have not grown, but they are full of the testaments of her strength and training now, hard and strong and hurting. He traces the space left behind by her wedding band with the callused pad of his massive thumb, and she pretends not to hear him apologize to Daniel.

“I'm sorry I killed your widow,” he whispers into her neck, voice wet. “I'm sorry the Jenny you loved is gone.”

It breaks her heart, but she holds still and feigns sleep until he kisses lower, lips over her breasts and hands against her ass, a nip of teeth that want her to wake up now and _make me feel it again_.

She comes alive under him, hiding her tears in moans and desperate cries when he pushes inside her, and he hides his face from her as well, grunting against her ear, but uncharacteristically lost for words.

She scratches fingers without nails through his scalp, pants against him and says, “It's good, it's so good, don't stop.”

Because she can't say _I'm not sorry that you found me_ , or _You make me feel like a person again_ , or _Thank you_.

She can't say _I love you_.

But she hopes he understands anyway.


	18. Terms

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I have to kill Rosalie.”
> 
> Frank sits down across the table from her and doesn't respond.
> 
> “I'll be better, stronger, more focused when she's gone.”
> 
> “You really think that?”
> 
> She purses her lips and turns away.
> 
> “You won't be,” he says softly, the same voice he uses to tell her to adjust her stance or block a kick. “Killing her won't make you whole again. Trust me, I know."

There's an explosion in Hell's Kitchen.

Jenny crouches over Rawlins’ corpse - fuck, _fuck_ , he wasn't supposed to die yet - and coughs through the rubble, stomach sinking as she staggers to her feet, shaking her head to clear the ringing sound from her ears and choking through the dust.

“Frank?”

Nothing.

She finds the building's entrance, caved in, the upper floors collapsed across the street and into the building behind them, rubs her eyes to clear her vision and is surprised to find blood on the back of her hand. She touches her fingers to her eye, then higher up. Temple is bleeding.

She takes a deep breath, turns around and counts the bodies. Assesses damage. Finds a way out. They missed this during recon, she doesn't know how, but nothing in their mission findings suggested explosives below the building. Or inside it. Or _beside_ it. Rawlins’ CIA shtick had been _enhanced interrogation_ , not explosives.

“Frank?”

She swallows the panic, tries to keep her head. They've discussed a contingency like this, but it's never happened before, they've never been separated on a job by something this unexpected, with no idea if they've both survived.

She moves - none of the bodies are Frank, she's counted them _twice_ \- and scoops up her jackknife from beside Rawlins’ corpse. Weeks of preparation, meticulous planning to get him in a situation where they can interrogate him at leisure, gone to waste now. They'll have to find another way to get to his distributors.

She limps a bit, shaking out stiffness in a knee that's probably spectacularly bruised already, and climbs out of a hole in the wall, wincing at the sounds of sirens approaching. There's no time to look for Frank, they'll just have to rendezvous back at the safehouse. She stumbles into the night air, hacks some more, then stops, gaping.

It isn't just their building. It's four or five buildings, nearly the whole industrial block, and she can hear the sounds of screams. Women's screams. Children's screams. She shakes her head, hands shaking, and swallows more panic.

“Frank.” It's barely a whisper, but it breaks through her daze enough for her to keep moving. She can't stay, can't sort through the rubble and help, there's too many cops on the way. She needs to get out before the perimeter is sealed, and she can only trust in Frank to do the same.

She's so focused on that thought that she nearly doesn't hear it.

“ _Jenny_ -”

She freezes. “Frank?”

“Jenny…”

She turns towards the sound. There's a crouching figure hidden in the shadows behind a dumpster, clutching its ribs like it hurts to stand. She approaches warily, squinting against the flickering firelight of the ruins of the block. She sees red.

Red.

“Red.”

He groans, takes a pained step forward, and she catches him before he stumbles. “I need-”

“Shut up, don't speak,” she hisses, propping him with her shoulder and carrying some of his weight. She winces as her knee threatens to buckle, but stays upright. “We need to get out of here.”

He groans again, but doesn't argue, and it's a testament to how badly he's hurt that he lets her carry most of his weight.

The journey is nerve-wracking, fraught with acres of confusion and pain and so much _fire_ , everything hot so that Jenny's clothes cling to her like a second skin. He stops her at random, points to another direction even if it is a detour, and she trusts his freakishly strong hearing enough that she doesn't waste time or energy arguing when he does. By the time they clear the ruin enough for her to feel comfortable enough to breathe, Red hasn't spoken in a long time, and she feels like his every movement is automatic.

She stops in the mouth of an alley, props him up against the wall and clenches her teeth at the throbbing in her knee. They're further away from the safehouse than they were when they started, and Red’s silence is starting to worry her. She doesn't think they can make it back there, not soon enough for it to matter. She clenches her jaw. Frank is out there, maybe hurt, maybe not, maybe in the safehouse right now and freaking out that she's not there. She hopes he'll forgive her for the decision she has to make.

“Red,” she coaxes, but he doesn't respond, chin drooping. “Come on, man, come on, wakey wakey.” She slaps his exposed jaw a little, and he groans, turns his face away from the abuse. Good enough.

She drags him to his feet and pulls him the last few streets back to the old abandoned gym, no evidence they'd ever been there at all, into the old office where she drops him finally on the desk and turns on one small overhead. He groans, hands fluttering over his own abdomen, reaching for something. Someone. She takes his hand, and he pants. She can't tell if his eyes are open or closed. There's a crack in his helmet, just on the inside of the right horn, and dark damp stains in the chest of his suit.

“Red,” she says, voice hoarse with the effort of staying calm.

He groans something that might be her name.

“Can you take this off?” She taps his chest. “I think you're hurt pretty bad. I think you need to let me look.”

He takes a deep breath, then nods, tugging off his gloves. It looks obscene, the reveal of his bruised and bloody knuckles, long slender fingers more suited to holding a pen or playing a piano than fighting bad guys. He reaches his fingers then to unclasp something beneath his chin, and she turns away, gut churning. She doesn't want to see this. She doesn't want to…

Self-loathing is a big enough part of her life that she recognizes it without thinking about it. The silence, the lack of acknowledgement behind her, tells her he recognizes it, too. Angry altar boy, full of demons. She can hear him struggling to get the armour off, but he doesn't ask for help, and she stays turned away, feeling like an intruder. When he finally settles, releasing a tortured breath, he says, “Jenny.”

She turns to him and finds him bare chested, but with his cowl back on and she breathes a sigh of relief. He should look ridiculous like that, a sort of mockery of a Mexican wrestler, but he doesn't. He looks achingly _young_.

She puts her hand out gently, traces the outline of a bruise just under his right pectoral. He doesn't react, and it's cool to the touch. Old bruise. There's a web of scars that reminds her of Frank, and the thought stabs through the calm for a moment before she gets it under control. She moves on to the next bruise, not as dark as the first, high beneath his arm, and he hisses when she touches it. It's hot. Fresh. New.

She peers closely at it, and can see the shadow of his ribs beneath. They look off. She plants her hand on his abdomen, presses a little into the skin, and he groans long and deep. She pulls back the hand.

“Broken rib,” she says quietly, and he nods.

“Two, actually.”

She laughs. “Jesus, Red.” She stops laughing, eyes drawn to a growing stain on the wood beneath him. “Hey… you're bleeding.” He clenches his jaw, then nods reluctantly. Jenny takes a deep breath, then reaches under his back. Immediately, her fingers are met with hot sticky blood, and he exhales sharply like the mere proximity of her causes him pain. “Roll onto your side for me.”

He lets out a sharp bark of a laugh. “Two broken ribs, remember?”

“Roll over or I'll break the rest, man.”

He smiles sardonically, but clenches his jaw again and rolls slowly onto his side. She stares at the bleeding mess of his wound, shrapnel wedged into just where the kidney should be.

Shit.

“That bad, huh?”

“Shut up,” Jenny says, voice quiet. She steps away, turns around and finds the bathroom easily. Inside she pulls out some cleaning supplies. Not ideal, but better than nothing. There's an old first aid kit she remembers behind the fire extinguisher. She and Frank had raided it for antiseptic and bandages, but there's an old suture kit. Meager supplies gathered, she stands back in her place, watching the rise and fall of Red's side in labored breathing. “This is… this'll hurt, yeah?”

“Of course it will,” he says, voice gone soft, and it's all she needs. She doesn't speak again as she cleans the wound, then wraps a piece of her sleeve around the piece of metal sticking out of his back and packs it in. She digs out the smaller fragments with a penknife, and to his credit Red groans and hisses and curses, but doesn't move. She sutures up the smaller wounds, then douses everything in window cleaner and makes more bandages out of her sleeves. By the time she's done, checking that the larger piece she can't remove is safely packed, he's mostly groaning.

She comes around to see him slack jawed and sweaty, and she crouches so she can speak close to his ear. “Red, we need to call Claire. That doctor friend of yours. I can't do more.”

“No,” he whispers. “Too dangerous. No.”

“We don't have a choice,” Jenny argues gently, and he looks like she's telling him about the death of a childhood pet. “That thing is probably in your kidney. If I try to take it out, I'll probably kill you.”

“It's not, I can-”

“Shut up.” He does, with the guilty look of a kid caught in a lie. “Give me her number. There's a phone booth on the corner. I'll talk to her.”

Claire's voice on the phone feels like something from a different world, and Jenny can hear background noises that tell her she's probably in a hospital. Jenny gives her the address quietly, and hangs up almost immediately after. There's gray in the sky, just before sunrise, and she feels weariness in her very bones. The prep, the mission, the fire. She looks longingly in the direction of the safehouse, and fiercely misses Frank.

She limps back into the gym, and can tell Red is surprised by the stiff lines of his back.

“I was expecting you to leave,” he says softly.

“And let your ungrateful ass die after all the work I did? I don't think so.” He huffs in response, and she sits by his head and wishes for a cigarette.

“What were you even doing there?”

“Rawlins,” she murmurs, frustration threatening to overwhelm at the undesired outcome. “He died in the blast.”

“You sound disappointed.”

“He had information.” Red grunts an acknowledgement. “What about you?”

He hesitates, then, as though he's lost the will to care, he sighs. “The Chaste.”

“Ah,” Jenny clicks her tongue. “Think they had something to do with the bombs?”

“Yes,” he says immediately, then clamps his jaw so tight she thinks he might crack his teeth.

“You'll deal with them. Make them pay for this.” It isn't a question, but he nods anyway.

“Was Castle with you when-?”

“He's fine,” she snaps, heart lurching in her chest. “He's waiting for me at the safehouse.”

“Yeah,” he says, but not like he believes her, like he's trying to soothe a skittish animal. “He's… he's strong. Reliable.”

“He saved my life,” she confesses quietly, and hates how sad and weak she sounds.

“He saved mine, too,” Red surprises her. “More than once.”

“You've done the same for him. I'm pretty sure he thinks you're square.”

“He thinks he owes me. Not because I saved him though, because I saved _you_.”

She drops her head, takes a deep breath to hold the panic at bay. There's no water, she reminds herself, no endless light, no pain. She takes another deep breath, then another. “I never said-”

“It's alright, you don't have to-”

“I'm not fucking thanking you,” she snaps, and he falls silent, surprised. “You should have killed them. All of them. Every single asshole that-”

“Most of them are in prison already, awaiting trial for-”

“Rosalie Carbone.” He falls silent, and she shakes her head, laughing bitterly. “She has to be stopped. I made a mistake letting her live, now she's-”

“You can't decide that, you have no right-”

“I have every right!” Jenny takes a shaking breath to regain control of her temper. “I'm the one she fucking toyed with for eight days, I'm the one that lost my fucking fingernails and-” _Daniel's wedding ring_ “-she’s out there fucking trading in murder because you don't have the balls to do what needs to be done!”

“I’m not a _murderer_ ,” he growls, low and dangerous. "Everyone deserves a second chance, everyone is redeemable."

“What makes someone like Rosalie fucking Carbone redeemable?”

“What makes you? Or me? Or _Frank_?”

She puts her hands out and shakes them in his face, laughs a little hysterically. “Fucking _nothing_ , Red! Nothing will ever wash the blood off these hands, no matter how many lives we fucking save, how many innocents we protect, nothing can save us!”

He goes quiet at that, and looks at her with something alarmingly close to pity. “I can't accept that,” he finally whispers.

She shakes, wraps her hands around herself and makes herself small. She rabidly envies him his faith in humanity, but knows in her heart she'll never share it.

When Claire finally arrives - looking _appalled_ at Jenny's handiwork no less - Jenny slips out quietly, ready to burst out of her skin. She makes her way to the safehouse dragging her bum knee half the way there, getting reckless and breathing heavily, desperate to find Frank, to touch him, to hold him, to feel his heart steady and alive and racing for her.

“Frank?”

She stumbles into the bakery, barely seeing anything, and before she can blink he's engulfed her in his massive arms against his massive chest.

“Frank, Frank, Frank,” she pants, clings to his Henley and presses herself as close as she can.

“You scared the shit out of me, girl,” he growls into her hair. “Where the fuck were you? What the fuck happened, we said-”

She yanks him down by the ears, covers his lips with hers and devours him, teeth clacking and biting. He kisses her back with the same desperate hunger, grips her hair, her waist, her breast.

They don't make it to the bed, they don't even make it a single step away from where they collided, falling over one another in a flurry of teeth and fingers, ripping away the barriers between them until he's slipping inside her, thick and gorgeous and fucking perfect, still gnawing at her bottom lip as he pushes deep into her and rocks, pulls her close and doesn't let go even to thrust.

She moans, wraps her legs tight around him, pants still hanging off of one leg with her boot still on, and digs her fingertips into his neck, pushes and takes and gives with everything she has, everything left that's still _her_ , and he cums with a glorious broken moan, buries his face into her neck, mouth open in a silent scream as he continues to twitch and empty inside her.

 

* * *

 

She explains eventually what happened, Red and the Chaste, and he agrees with her to stay out of it unless he asks them to step in. She tells him about Rawlins, and he clenches his jaw and shakes his head, tells her to move on.

Her knee is in bad enough shape that she limps around for another week, but Frank comes out unscathed except for a new set of scrapes and bruises, and a strange new tendency to touch her for no reason. It isn't much, a hand on her shoulder, fingertips on her neck, but he always looks at her so strangely when he does, and it makes her stupid battered heart race. She wakes up a couple of days later to find him holding her knee gently in one large palm, placing soft kisses to the inside of her thigh with his eyes closed, long lashes casting shadows down his cheek in the early afternoon sunlight. For some reason, even though they are both marked and bandaged and hurt, even though there's a yawning gaping hole in her cratered where Daniel's ring used to sit, she glimpses a magical alternate life with Frank in that moment.

Free of pain. Free of torture and death and blood. Free of bullets and jagged white scars and unending loss and anger. Is there enough humanity left in her to heal his wounds? Not the sloppy stitches he taught her to make, not the bullets she digs from his body, but the deep festering wounds still weeping messily inside him, inside her, inside the both of them together. Is there enough left in her to accept his healing in turn? To become a person again? Can loving Frank make her whole?

She doesn't know. She reaches for him, hands shaking in his hair, and he looks at her then, a soft dark look in his eyes that melts her defences in her sleep-addled state. In those eyes she sees Sunday mornings, and weekend barbecues, and dinner after work, and nights spent in front of a television watching something just because it's on. She sees him smiling at her in a kitchen plating salads, zipping up a dress for her before a night out, a home with curtains and a bed with bedding and a shelf with pictures of the two of them together eating soft serve ice cream on Coney Island.

She releases a shaky breath, and his fingers clench against her thigh. He crawls over her, hovering and covering and protecting all at once, and she traces the shape of his lips with her fingertips. The sight of the missing fingernails jars her from the fantasy, and she begins to shake. If there was ever hope for her, ever a chance at that life, it's gone now, gone down the drain with her dignity and her fingernails and her fucking blood on some basement floor, spilled by a monster she had mistaken for a victim.

Frank shushes her even though she hasn't made a sound, lowers himself onto her with the gentleness she fell in love with, with the massive strength she doesn't deserve but still needs, wraps her up tight and squeezes so hard she can barely breathe. She shakes harder, turns her face towards him and finds his lips, kisses him softly and slowly like she's never kissed him before. He follows her lead, accepts her pace, tastes her tongue with a leisure they've never felt like they had. Those Sunday mornings and weekend barbecues swell in her chest, laughing in sunlight with Frank's arm around her, smiling at her with that all-knowing look in his eyes, brow finally smooth and unfurled, no more pain, no more worry, no more death…

He cups her breast gently, thumb stroking the little scar of Claire's neat stitches underneath, a soothing touch where she never thought she'd be soothed again. It only takes a few shifts of their hips, his hand gently lifting her injured knee around his waist, and he finds his way inside her. It feels like home, like love, like what life might have been but could never be again. She moans long and low as he rocks into her slowly, taking his time, breathing heavily against her lips with his eyelids fluttering like he's memorising the feel of her around him. He still stretches her, even after all this time, that edge that used to feel demanding, but that now feels comforting.

 _You can take it_ , it says to her. _You can take everything I have to give._

She wraps her arms around his waist, tangles her fingers against his lower back, pulls him to her so she can place soft kisses against his open mouth. He tastes like black coffee and bruised lips and everything she thought she would never have again after Daniel.

For the first time, in the slanting sunlight from the high window that day, they shed the desperation that usually drives their sex. They feel each other, taste one another, as though there is time. As though there are no monsters to hunt, no killers to punish, no graves in the cold hard ground where there should only be warmth and life.

He doesn’t speed up, his pace languid and unhurried, but his strokes are deeper, harder, and she knows he’s close. She wants to speak his name, but she’s terrified of breaking the spell, ruining the fantasy for him. For both of them. His eyes are still closed. Is he still here with her?

He groans as he cums, curling against her, arms tightening as he buries his face in her shoulder and says-

“ _Jenny_.”

Oh God.

He pants, kissing softly up her neck and licking her lips, and for once doesn’t pull out. He’s still hard inside her when he reaches his hand between them, presses his thumb against her clit and strokes her the way he knows she likes. She gasps, eyes fluttering closed at his touch, rolls her hips lazily and lets the sensation engulf her to her very toes.

“Look at me,” he says softly, not an order, not a rough command, a quiet plea that makes her shiver and whimper. She opens her eyes, fixes her gaze unsteadily on his face. He watches her like he’s never seen her before, searching, pleading, and she has no idea what he’s looking for. It’s difficult to focus, difficult to think with his hard length stretching her and his fingers working her. She’s close, so close.

“Please,” she whispers, and something unidentifiable passes over his face. She doesn’t have time to figure it out before he kisses her, slow and deep and carnal all at once, thumb pressing hard and she shatters against him, crying out into his mouth, shaking and gasping for breath he won’t give her, won’t stop kissing her long enough to allow her.

She’s dizzy by the time she comes down, her lungs full of him, the heady scent of their sex and sweat. He still hasn’t pulled out of her, but she can feel him softening, and it almost physically hurts because she knows, somehow, that once he does, the magic of the day will be gone. He holds her like he knows it, too, lips never leaving her skin long, tasting and nuzzling in a way he’s never done before. It almost feels like a goodbye, and she turns her face away from him so he doesn’t see the full ugly truth of her feelings there. He’s seen her naked a lot, and she’s bled in front of him a thousand times, but she’s never felt this open with him before.

“Jenny?”

She tries her best to smooth her face before she turns to him. He has his face pressed into her neck, though, hidden from her. “Yes, Frank?”

The silence stretches, becomes unbearable. Then, “Nothing.”

He slips from inside her moments later, walks away naked, disappears into the bathroom and turns the shower on. She sits up carefully, stares at her naked ring finger and tries desperately to pull herself together.

By the time he comes back out, she's dressed and calm, sitting at their table with her Desert Eagle in her hand.

And then she says, “I have to kill Rosalie.”

Frank sits down across the table from her and doesn't respond.

“I'll be better, stronger, more focused when she's gone.”

“You really think that?”

She purses her lips and turns away.

“You won't be,” he says softly, the same voice he uses to tell her to adjust her stance or block a kick. “Killing her won't make you whole again. Trust me, I know."

“I wasn't whole when she got her hands on me,” Jenny smiles to herself. “Not even when you did.”

“Jenny.” She looks at him then, and he's staring at her, intense and focused and it's been a long time since he's looked at her like that. “You won't feel better.”

She shakes her head, and is horrified to feel tears fill her eyes. She wipes them angrily with the heels of her palms, then leans forward and meets his gaze fiercely. “I have to. I can't, I have to- she has to fucking _die_!”

Because maybe, just fucking maybe, if Rosalie was dead, if her nightmares were gone, if she could uninfect the diseased things those men touched inside her, she could be that person again. She could be human again, real and alive and soft, sweet enough to love Frank the way he should be loved.

But so long as her tormentor, her nightmare, her failure is still breathing, she could never be...

Never be  _enough_.

“Yeah,” he nods, face sad like he knows exactly what she can't say. “Yeah, okay.”

She wipes at her face again, stands up and grabs her jacket. He doesn't ask her where she's going, lets her storm out into the cold and curl her hands into fists deep in her pockets, breathe heavily and stomp around alleys looking for a fight.

Whatever it is she exudes, it makes everyone leave her alone. She takes shelter from the cold in a diner finally, takes deep breaths and sits at the counter.

“What can I getcha?”

Jenny jumps slightly at the cheery tone, stares at the waitress with something like awe.

“You okay?”

“Yeah, sorry,” she chokes out, clears her throat and tries again. “Coffee, please. Black.”

“Sure,” the waitress says, smiling, forgetting, turning away already. Jenny wonders if it had been so easy for her back then, if it had been routine to smile and ask and simultaneously _not care_ , if she really had been broken even back then, and she knows, she _knows_ , she was never this kind oblivious soul. “Anything else?” she asks, still smiling as she fills the chipped mug.

“No, thank you, ma'am.”

The waitress looks at her strangely, and Jenny exhales as she realizes what she's just said. “You sure?” The waitress smiles a little softly, takes in Jenny's boots, her worn jacket, the scars and bruises on her hands and cheeks. “It's cold out there.”

Jenny laughs, bites her lip down on the hysteria bubbling in her chest, shakes her head. “Thank you. I'm okay.”

“You got someplace to be? There's a shelter on 52nd that might have a few beds.”

“Yes, ma'am,” Jenny nods, curls her hands around the mug and lets the warmth of the coffee seep into her fingers. “I got someplace to be.”

The waitress smiles again, nods to the mug. “You let me know if I can get you anything else, okay?”

“I will. Thanks again.”

Jenny scalds her tongue drinking the coffee too fast, stands up and shucks too many bills on the counter for the kind waitress, and leaves before what's out there can sweep into a diner and end a girl's life. Rosalie is looking for her. Rosalie will stop at nothing to get her back for killing her husband.

When she gets back to Frank, he pretends like he's unaffected, flipping through the police scanner with his back turned to her. She pulls his chair out, straddles him and kisses him hard, wraps her arms around his neck and grinds against his rapidly forming erection. He growls into her mouth, nips her lips.

“What's gotten into you?”

“Just you,” she murmurs between kisses across his jaw and neck. “Just want you.”

“I'm here,” he says, hands large and sure around her hips, pulling her close. It isn't quite _I'm yours_ , but it's close enough.

 

* * *

 

It's almost a month later before Red drops in on her having a smoke and peeking through a warehouse window through the scope of Frank's rifle.

“Well, look who's back together again.”

“We need to talk,” he says, and his tone is serious enough that she snaps the scope closed and turns to him, cigarette stuck between her teeth.

“So talk.”

He stands in the shadows, like she hasn't turned away from the sight of his naked face, like he thinks he has anything left to hide from her. She stares at him, and he shifts but doesn't step into the light.

“I've found Rosalie Carbone,” he finally admits, and that gets her to her feet, cigarette falling away forgotten.

“Where?”

“No,” he shakes his head, horns disappearing and reappearing in the light. “Not like this. I have terms.”

“You have fucking _what_?”

“You can't kill her. You have to promise me, swear to me on Daniel's grave, on Frank's life, that you won't kill her.”

“Why the fuck would I do that?” she hisses, takes a step forward and he steps back like she's the dangerous one, like she's the one who can take out a dozen guys with her bare hands, and she hasn't tried it, but recently she thinks she can.

“It's the only way I'll tell you where she is.”

“I'll find her my fucking self.”

“You won't. You've tried. You can't.”

She curls her hands into fists, releases them with a deep breath. “Please, Red. You don't understand, you don't get it. She's damaged. You can't save someone with that kind of damage.”

“We can all be saved,” he says fiercely, stupidly, stepping forward again so she can see his jaw in the light, tight and set stubbornly. “You say she's damaged, but we all are, Jenny. Every one of us. And maybe you think there's no coming back from what you've done, but there is, and this is it. Prove to me your revenge isn't more important to you than getting her off the streets. Prove to me you care more about protecting people from her than you do about punishing her for what she did to you.”

She shakes her head, opens her mouth, then closes it again and turns away. “Why are you even telling me? Why don't you just do this job yourself?”

“Because I believe you can be the girl Daniel fell in love with again.”

Jenny feels breathless, like he's kicked her in the sternum. With a choked laugh, she leans back, slides down to the concrete floor, covers her eyes with her palm and laughs and laughs. There are tears hidden behind her palm, but she won't let Red see them. She won't shed them here.

Frank is going to be so disappointed in her.

“Where is she?”

“Do I have your word?”

She laughs again, swallows it down before it turns hysterical, then wipes discreetly at her eyes and looks at him. “You have my word. On Frank's life.”

He loosens suddenly, tension leaving his body all at once making him shrink before her very eyes. “Meet me in the gym in an hour. Bring Frank. Make sure he understands the terms.”

“I'll need two hours,” Jenny argues weakly, and he frowns but nods.

“Two hours.”

He melts into the shadows as suddenly as he appeared, and Jenny shakes her head, struggling to keep her shit together. She has to tell him, has to explain, has to convince him because Red is right - she fucking _hates_ that he is - about one thing. Rosalie Carbone has to be stopped. Even Red's half measures are better than letting her operate as she is, stronger every day, gaining traction through her reputation, building an army, hidden so far underground that months of Frank trying to track her and weeks of Jenny trying to do the same have yielded nothing.

She gets to her feet, packs the rifle and picks up her cigarette butts, bundles herself up and jogs out into the night. It's too cold for this time of year, with no sign of letting up, but she's burning up from the inside out. She climbs the fire escape to the abandoned apartment they've set up in since the explosion, checks the time. Rendezvous is in twelve minutes. She has to convince him, has to.

Frank arrives exactly four minutes late, long enough for Jenny to have chewed her lip bloody, and he takes one look at her and says, “What happened?”

“Red found Rosalie,” she blurts, too jittery to ease into it.

“Shit,” Frank drops his duffel, rubs his jaw. “How?”

“Doesn't matter, the point is, he's letting us in on the job.”

He pauses, then lowers his hand slowly. “Red never lets me in on a job without terms.”

Jenny swallows, then nods deliberately.

“What did you say?”

“I…”

He chuckles, shakes his head. He _does_ look disappointed, and it makes her feel small and stupid.

“I'm sorry, Frank. I had to- I have to know she's- that she can't-”

“Hey,” he says softly, steps forward and cups the back of her head. “You don't gotta explain anything to me. This is your call. You sure this is how you wanna do this?”

She laughs, leans into his big rough palm and closes her eyes. “No. I'm not sure of anything. I don't think I have been since she...”

“Jenny,” he says, just that, just her name, and it's so full of unspoken things that she squeezes his wrist, presses her lips to his palm.

“What do I do, Frank? What's the right thing to do? Please, tell me. I don't know.”

“Whatever you need, girl. Anything.” She opens her eyes, and she can't help but die a little in the deeply broken parts of her that make her wake up screaming. He looks so sincere, so solid.

“Will you come with me? To meet Red?”

“Yeah,” he nods, brow deeply creased, and she lets out a shaking breath. "Anything."

“Thank you,” she whispers, and he kisses the tears away before they fall.


	19. Redemption

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guys...
> 
> I have no words.

Red is in the gym, standing over the table still soaked in his blood with his back to them both. Frank gives her an odd look, but neither of them say anything, waiting for him to acknowledge them.

“She's told you my terms?”

“Sure,” Frank says, voice deceptively mild. “Don't kill the psycho sadist crazy lady.”

“Don't kill _anyone_.”

“I didn't fucking agree to that,” Jenny hisses, argumentative and angry.

“Does it make a difference? Rosalie Carbone is the one you really want, isn't it?”

“You think if I get my hands on one of the bastards that raped and tortured her I'm not gonna-?”

“Frank.” She puts her hand on his arm, just a touch of fingertips, and he immediately falls silent, tense enough to make her teeth ache. “Yeah. Okay. No one dies.”

Frank turns to her then, and for a minute, she thinks he's going to overrule her, tell Red to fuck off and take her by the arm, drag her back home. She'd go. She wouldn't argue, wouldn't try to change his mind. But whatever he sees in her eyes makes him turn away again, nod once, and keep silent.

“Good.” Red looks small and deflated again, fists uncurling. “Rosalie Carbone is meeting with a small time drug dealer tomorrow night. I know when and where. Meet here at midnight exactly, and I'll take you to her. It'll be twice the security, but with the three of us, we should be able to take her.”

“Who's this drug dealer? Why are they meeting?” Frank sounds strained, like he's dying to give orders, and she knows he's only keeping it together for her sake.

“I don't know. New player. I've never heard of him before.”

“And when you say security-”

“It's a risk-”

“Guys,” Jenny interrupts, head spinning with tension. “Twice the security, between the three of us.”

"Midnight here tomorrow," Red repeats, jaw clenching and unclenching.

They go back to home base and wrap tightly around one another. They're such a tangle of limbs Jenny can't find where she ends and where Frank begins.

"Frank?"

"Yeah, girl?"

"Will you talk to me?"

He snorts a little, the world dark outside and the city eerily silent. "What about?"

"Anything. Please."

He hesitates. She thinks he isn't going to say anything at all when he finally says, "I've been shot more times than anyone has any right to survive. Tried counting 'em once. Stopped in the twenties."

"Bullets ain't got nothing on you," she tries to joke, and he huffs a laugh.

"So I keep wondering how come it only took one bullet to kill Lisa."

She stops breathing.

"I held her in my arms while she died. Maria and Frankie were already dead, but Lisa was... the bullet caught her in the lung. She drowned in her own blood."

Jenny doesn't know what to say, doesn't think there's anything she possibly could say.

"I should have died."

She's glad he didn't. But she can't say that, can't put into words that awful selfish sentiment, not knowing that Frank would give anything to trade places with any of them. She presses her palms into his back and pulls him closer, noses over his chest to where his heart is hammering, and presses her lips there.

"Sometimes I wonder... everything I do, everything we do, is it worth it? Have I changed anything? Every time one dies another takes his place. Every time you knock out one gang another one swoops in. I can't change the world. I can't even change the city. It's like they died for nothing."

"No, Frank," she says, voice shaking but unable to stay silent any longer. "That's not true. You've saved so many."  _You've saved me._

He puts his rough palm against her cheek, tilts her face towards him as though he can see her in the dark. His eyes gather the light, glow in his dark unhappy face.

"We don't have to do this, Frank," she whispers, voice catching on emotions too enormous to bear. "Rosalie, all of it, I don't..."  _It won't make you whole again._ "We can call it off."

"No," he says, soft but firm. "I need this, too. I wish there weren't terms attached to it, but... I'd sleep better at night knowing she wasn't out there trying to hurt you anymore."

She reaches for him, and he pulls her into a heated kiss. This part she knows how to do. She knows how to tell him the things with her body she can't ever say with words. Not now, not ever, knowing his heart is full to bursting with people far better than she'll ever be. No, she can't heal him with her love.

He has it anyway.

 

* * *

 

 

They follow Red down a winding path through a maze of alleys that have them doubling back on themselves several times. At first Jenny thinks he's trying to throw them off the path for some reason, until she realizes they don't run into a single person the whole way there.

She reaches out for Frank's hand, squeezes his fingers, a silent question. He squeezes back, an answer she doesn't understand.

Red pauses outside a pizza restaurant with one light on in the back, turns his head a little, listening to something she can't hear. She holds her breath, the sounds of the city seeming oddly loud for some reason.

It's cold, and she thinks of Daniel in the frozen ground, and wonders if this is what he wanted for her. A compromise between what needs to be done and _the right thing_ , saving the city and saving herself. Except she knows there is no such thing as a compromise when it comes to what needs to be done. It just needs to be done.

“We need eyes, Red.”

Frank's low voice makes her jump, even though it's barely a whisper, and Daredevil nods without turning, points to a dumpster behind the squat building.

Frank nods at Jenny, and she nods back, gesturing with two fingers. _I'll cover you_.

He crouches out of sight of the windows, even though they're all dark with nothing but the skeletal legs of stacked chairs outlined by the street lamps. At the dumpster he straightens, back flattened and head tilted, to peek around its edge into the lit window. Jenny watches his profile, his nose catching the light while the rest of him stays hidden in shadow, and when he pulls back, his face is grim. He crooks his finger at her, nods at the window. She brushes past him and takes a slow peek herself.

Rosalie. Rosalie Carbone, statuesque in a blood red dress, hair long and shining in cheap fluorescent lights, lips painted to match, stands between three meatheads in leather jackets.

_What's your name?_

Jenny thumbs the space where here wedding ring used to be, and it's like she's finding out it's gone for the first time all over again. She takes a deep breath, forces herself to look away from her moving lips - _I'm gonna show you the inside of his fucking head! -_ and takes in the dealer. Her gut clenches and she leans back against the dumpster, eyes meeting Frank's.

“Shit,” she breathes, and he nods once to show he knows.

“What?” Red is so quiet and still, she would lose track of him if she didn't know he was there.

“The buyer,” Frank whispers, barely audible over the wind. “That's Curtis Brown, Toomey's gun hand.”

“Toomey?”

“John James and Shauna, married couple. Drug dealers. They're dead.” Jenny glances at Frank when she says this, and he purses his lips, face unreadable. “Shauna was working with Rosalie before Frank took her out, and Curtis was her boy toy. It's not a coincidence he's here.”

Red takes this information with a stoic silence, head lowered, hands clenched. “They're talking about the explosion. They think it might have killed you.”

Jenny and Frank exchange another glance, and Frank shakes his head minutely, _don't ask_.

“Rosalie wants to wait until it's confirmed you're dead, Curtis wants to…” he blanches suddenly, so shaken that even the dark can't hide it. “They're… they've been dealing with the Chaste.”

Jenny shakes her head, looks at Red desperately. “The orphanage, Red. It's-”

“A recruitment center.” He clenches his jaw. “Not just soldiers. Slave trade. Drug mules. Enforcers.”

“We have to stop her, she has to-”

“She might have information on the Chaste. We had a deal. No one dies tonight.”

Jenny swallows her argument, turns away from both of them and takes a deep shuddering breath, thumb digging into the calluses from where her wedding ring used to be. No fingernails to scratch the skin off her face, no breath to mock and laugh and pretend it doesn't hurt. She takes another breath, then another, before she can turn back around and nod, not meeting their eyes.

“What's your plan?” Frank growls, voice low and angry, barely controlled.

“Three ways in. Front door, back door, windows. I'll stay here, crash in when it's time. You each cover one of the doors.”

“How long?”

“A few minutes. As much as I can give you.”

Frank nods, then signals to Jenny. “You cover the front. I'll take the back.”

She nods, wants to reach for him, but hesitates. He cups her cheek instead, as though Red isn't there, as though they're completely alone, and he says, “Come back to me.”

She smiles, unable not to, and says, “Yes, Sir.”

He kisses her then, not the hungry click of teeth and blood, something soft and forgiving, and she tries to show the same. She wants to say, _You're my life now_. She wants to say, _I am yours forever._ When they part, Red has his back turned to them, eyes on the window.

She turns around and leaves.

 

* * *

 

There are two guards outside the front entrance, eyeing one another with open distaste, one rolling a cigarette while the other menacingly cleans his gun. Jenny can't shoot them, because _no one dies tonight_ and fuck she hates this. She tosses a bullet against the wall behind them instead, then catches the idiot with his gun out in the base of the skull with her nightstick. The other guy drops his cigarette, but she catches him in the solar plexus before he can reach his gun or make a sound, then knocks him out cold.

As she steps over them and through the door, she wonders how Red could ever leave behind him someone who could get up any minute and shoot him in the ass. The front of the restaurant is deserted, and the only light comes from the street lamps outside and the kitchen door. She leans against the wall beside it and waits. She can hear Rosalie's voice but she can't make out the words. It makes her skin crawl.

_What's your name?_

She counts a little over a minute before the windows break in a deafening crash, and she rushes into the kitchen, thumping the heavy door into the head of a goon with his hand in his jacket.

Red is a whirlwind, limbs and clubs in perfect harmony, and Frank is perfection, knives slicing cleanly through hamstrings and elbows, but Jenny has her eyes set on Rosalie, and anyone that gets in her way she tears through like paper.

There's shooting, of course there's shooting, and Red takes out the lights so that Jenny has to blink in the sudden dark before her eyes adjust to the pearling dawn light from outside. Someone catches her in the side, just wings her, and she hisses as she knocks Curtis out with a vicious blow to the jaw. Rosalie is stumbling in her heels, one of her meatheads shooting at Red with his big meaty hand wrapped around her arm, but her wide eyes are on Jenny, and they're full of fear.

She catches the meathead in the wrist, and he drops his gun with a scream, but she cracks him over the ear before he can even turn and see who got him, and Rosalie lets out a terrified shriek.

Jenny covers her mouth, pushes her back against the wall and presses hard against her jaw and neck.

“Shhhhh,” she hisses, a little hysterical. “Shut the fuck up, Rosalie, just shut the fuck up!”

“No I don't think so, bitch,” a warm muzzle presses to the back of her neck, and a hammer cocks. “Step down.”

The silence is deafening. Either Frank and Red have taken out everyone else in the room, or every set of eyes is focused on them. She can't turn to look. She just stares into Rosalie's gray eyes, framed in perfect winged liner and gorgeous false lashes, watches the tears fill them and ruin her mascara.

“I suggest you both back the fuck up before JI Jane here catches a bullet,” Curtis presses his gun harder against the base of her skull to emphasize.

“Don't be an idiot,” Frank drawls. “You shoot through her spindly little neck, and Rosalie catches the same bullet.”

“You think I give a fuck?” Curtis laughs. “This little bitch killed Shauna.”

“ _I_ killed Shauna,” Frank responds, and the blow to the side of her head is blinding, out of fucking nowhere. Jenny blinks at the floor, on her hands and knees, before Curtis hauls her up by the hair with her back pressed against him and sticks his stupid fucking gun in her face.

“I will fucking kill her, asshole!”

Everyone else is down, and Red is picking himself up from a graceless heap with his hand over his side, face tight with pain, but Frank is smiling, the saucy brain melting smile he gives her when she beats him in a sparring match, and he says, “Nah. You won't.”

Jenny smiles back, all teeth, then knocks her head back and headbutts the fuck out of Curtis Brown. He stumbles, and she turns around and delivers three precise blows, jaw, chest, head. He falls like a sack of bricks, just when two shots ring out, impossibly loud and echoing and deafening.

_“NO!”_

Frank falls, looking surprised.

Rosalie looks triumphant, tiny little .22 pistol shaking in her hands, mouth open to taunt or laugh. Red knocks it out of her perfectly manicured hands with a club from across the room, breaks a few fingers just as Jenny shoves Rosalie's head against the wall with a sick crack before she runs to Frank’s side, sliding to her knees. She hears the soft sound of boots, the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen standing over her shoulder, breathing heavily.

“Come on,” she says, voice shaking, cupping Frank’s neck where he's bleeding, pulling his head onto her lap. “Come on, Frank, look at me, _look at me!_ ”

His eyes flutter, but they don’t seem focused. He turns to her, smiles a little. It comes out more of a grimace, but he looks her in the eye and says, “Jenny.”

“I’m here, Frank, I’m gonna take care of you,” she says, shoving hard against the blood _there's so much_ , gushing through her fingers. She strips her jacket, wads it up and pushes it against the wound, it looks so small, _why is it bleeding so much_? He groans, coughing up blood.

“Nah, this is it, girl. It's too late. I'm a goner.”

There’s too much blood, too much blood soaking his t-shirt and dripping from his mouth, from those lips she loves so much. His breathing sounds wet and rattling.

“Frank?”

“I don't mind. It's okay. I'm ready.”

This can’t be happening, _this can’t be happening_ because she can’t, she couldn’t possibly, she just _can’t-_

“I can’t do this without you,” she sobs. “Please, don’t- don’t leave me, Frank, I can’t do this without you, I- I can’t-”

“Listen, there isn't- isn't much time now. Listen to me.”

“Frank, _no._ ”

“Saving you was one of the best things I ever did, Jenny. I was… I didn’t think I was ever gonna… I wasn’t ever supposed to love someone again.”

“Don’t, Frank, don’t-”

“But I love you, don’t I? I have for a long time. Never said it, though. That was dumb. I should have learned from the first time around that you should say it every chance you get. Every day. You know I love you, don’t you? Say you know, Jenny.”

 _She didn’t know_. “I know, Frank,” she lies, teeth clenched. “You didn’t need to say it, I always knew. I know you love me.”

“Good,” he sighs, pain lines easing from his face for the first time since she’s met him. “Good girl.”

“You know that I love you too, don’t you, Frank? That I’ve always loved you?”

He blinks. He looks dazed. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” She brushes her fingers across his brow. “I love you.”

He laughs then, that disbelieving laugh, blood bubbling through his mouth and the hole in his neck, and she finally _finally_ understands. “How does a dumb jarhead like me get a lioness like you to love him?”

“I don't know. Just love you. I love you so much.”

He beams at her. “Good.” He blinks a little, as though he can’t see her, and takes a wet shuddering breath. “It’s too much. All the sadness, all the death, it’s too much for anyone to carry with them.” He reaches for her, and she catches his bloody hand, presses it to her cheek damp with tears. “Anyone but you.”

“If I could,” she whispers fiercely, “I'd kill every single one of them. I'd wipe them out. And you'd never have had to exist at all.”

He smiles then, a tired knowing smile, and doesn’t say anything else. She cries quietly, watching the last of him fade from his eyes. He looks peaceful, still, unhappiness finally gone from the rigid lines of his face. Jenny gently tugs her fingertips over his eyelids, closes them for him. He looks like he could be sleeping.

When she cradles his corpse and cries, she doesn’t swallow the sounds. She sobs, wails and screams and shouts herself hoarse. She cries harder than she’s ever cried before, feels the warmth of him fade in her arms, soaks herself in his blood and soaks him in her tears and snot. She cries and cries for him, because even though she’s been taught to experience her pain in silence, this is more than she can stand.

“Jenny.”

“Don’t… don’t call me that.”

Red crouches beside her, puts a gloved hand on her shoulder and she flinches, slapping his arm away.

“Don't fucking touch me! You did this, you-!” She clenches her teeth and groans. It feels like someone has pushed a hand down her throat and is scraping out the remnants of her soul. “I can’t leave him here,” she says, voice broken. “I can’t just… I can’t leave him, he wouldn’t leave me, he didn’t…”

She doesn’t know how to explain, how to tell him that he’d picked her up when she’d been bleeding on a diner floor, just another victim until he’d given her a second chance at life, until he’d taught her to _be somebody._

And now he's gone, because Red thought there was something worth redeeming in her, in Rosalie, and she'd sworn on Frank's life…

 _Frank's dead_.

She yanks Frank's Ruger from its holster and shoots it at Rosalie's prone unconscious form, empties the clip in her face, blows every recognisable piece of her off while her other hand cradles Frank's head in her lap. When there are no more bullets and no more Rosalie Carbone, she beats her hand and the gun against the floor, screams wordlessly until something splinters and breaks, until _she_ splinters and breaks, drops the gun and covers her face with her shaking hand and feels sick.

She doesn't feel better at all.

Nothing can redeem them now.

“The police are gonna be here soon,” Daredevil says quietly. His voice sounds pretty rough. “You need to be gone before they get here.”

She turns to him then. “You letting me go?”

He hesitates. “This isn't the time.”

Sneering, “Feeling guilty, _Red_?”

He looks like he just got punched in the gut.

She turns back to Frank’s body in her arms. A few minutes ago, a man, he had a name and a face and she had loved him with every fibre of her being. Now he’s just a body. She presses a last lingering kiss to his temple, to his closed eyelid. Her hand bumps against his dog tags, and she makes a strangled sound at the way they still feel warm. She pulls them carefully over his head, then lowers him gently onto his back.

When she gets up, Red stays, down on one knee beside him, head lowered. He looks like he’s praying. She hopes he is. Frank deserves to have someone pray for him.

“This is your fault,” she whispers, dark ugly accusation churning deep from the parts of her that Frank had kept warm and soft. Already she can feel them hardening, growing cold, while Frank's warmth radiates from the chain clutched in her fist. “You see where your half-measures have led us? _You_ killed him. You're his murderer.”

“Je-”

“Don't you dare. Don't you fucking dare. There's nothing you can say, nothing will make this forgivable. _Nothing._ I ever see you again, you're dead. You understand me, Red? If I ever see you again I'll kill you.”

He swallows, not afraid, just… broken. His head droops, like the weight of it is more than he can bear. “I understand.”

Later, she thinks turning away from him is the hardest thing she’s ever had to do. She doesn’t look back, doesn't look again at the corpse of the Punisher, because if she does she might just eat a bullet, disappoint Frank after all. She can hear him in the back of her mind still.

_The memories of them that only you carry live inside you. If you die, that part of them dies as well._

_Frank is dead._

It feels like the very last piece of her has died with him.

She doesn’t look back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'M SO SO SORRY.
> 
> I wrote two different endings for this story before this one, but this was the only way it could have ended. Nothing else could have possibly been the outcome, and I knew that from the beginning though I tried desperately to find a way.
> 
> I seriously have no words. I'm so sorry.


	20. Epilogue

She doesn’t stop. She picks up Frank’s duffel, everything he owned, and she moves on to a new safehouse far away from the mattress that still smells like him.

The day they bury him, she hides out behind an old oak in the cemetery. There’s only a priest, a blind guy, and a woman with long blond hair who cries against his shoulder. She watches them, eyes dry, and she remembers the red wetness cooling between her fingers, the dead weight settling in her lap. Her hands tingle as though asleep.

All that training, and she hadn't been able to do anything but hold him while he died. Get him killed. She knows what she said to Red, but this is her fault. She had looked into Rosalie's black eye and seen something that wasn't there. Her stupidity had cost her a piece of her soul, and cost Frank his life. The weight of that knowledge should grind her bones to dust, harden her flesh into granite.

She should have died.

She stands behind the tree, smokes one of Frank’s cigarettes, thinks of him in the cold hard ground, and questions her sobriety. The bronze chip she finds deep at the bottom of his duffel when she gets back keeps her from questioning it too much.

After that, she figures out new ways to do things alone which she’d only ever done with Frank. She trains by herself. She does her own recon, she plans her own missions. She achieves her objectives.

She kills every witness.

Every time she does, she swears she can hear him, see that flash of teeth when he’d look at her like she was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen and say _good girl_.

When she gets shot or cut or stabbed, she stitches herself up. She questions her sobriety some more, clenches her teeth, and smokes her way through it instead.

Sometimes, she sees Red. He doesn't approach, they can't _talk_ or _share information_ anymore, so he hovers, just outside of the range of her weapons. She has to pretend not to see him, because if she does then she'll have to kill him, and the last person in the world that still knows her name will be dead.

She gets her five year chip somewhere along the line. She stares at it for long hours after, trying to throw it away. Instead, she takes it to the cemetery, buries it next to his grave, and tries to remember how it felt when he was proud of her. All she remembers is the smell of Frank's blood she hadn't been able to wash off her hands, so she kills every single foot soldier that ever worked for Rosalie Carbone or Curtis Brown.

The ones who tortured her always beg the loudest.

Without Frank’s big rough palms to strengthen her knuckles against, she takes to punching walls and furniture and bare knuckle boxers and men in dark alleyways pinning down crying girls. She likes it, likes the feeling of bone on flesh before she puts her Desert Eagle in their mouths and blows their fucking heads off.

She thinks she’s a lot more fucked up than she’s given herself credit for being.

She wears his dog tags. She wears his deadhead. She carries his guns, his arsenal. She lays in cold dark rooms without him and shakes apart under the strength of his absence.

She busts the rape video ring wide open, shoots every piece of shit in the junk, offs the husband of a scared young girl that might as well be her, ten years ago, silent and wide eyed and face more pain and misery than any young girl should know. In that moment she understands why he wears it. _Wore_ it. Big skull on his chest, and the look in their eyes, when they see, when they know what's come for them. The girl stares at it like she's staring into salvation, an avenging angel, an answered prayer, and asks, “Who are you?”

“I'm nobody,” she says, voice scratchy with disuse. “Just another Kitchen widow.”

Except it's a lie. She knows she's no one's weapon anymore, no one's backup, no one's eye in the sky, no one's gun hand, no one's field medic, no one's sparring partner…

But she's still his. And he's hers. And in the ugly hardened thing living deep in her chest are the memories of him that only she carries. The legacy of his mission. The way his voice sounded when he said the names of his children. The knowledge of his wife's cesarean scar. The flash of his bloody teeth when he smiled and said _good._  His voice, speaking her name, telling her he loved her.

And she's herself as well, finally and for the first time. A Kitchen widow. An alcoholic. A killer. A beacon of hope, saving the city without hope of redemption. Daniel's widow. A soldier fighting a war she cannot win. The woman who loves the Punisher, trying to build a world she'll never belong to.

Jenny. Just Jenny.

They take to calling her  _Widowmaker_. It sounds like a kid’s story, and it makes her chuckle a little wryly the first time she sees a headline when she’s on a supply run. Sometimes they just call her _Lady Punisher_ , and sometimes they call her _the Ghost of the Punisher_. She can almost hear Frank snorting at that. _You’re no one’s ghost, girl. You’re a lioness. You’re a queen._

But they don’t call her _lioness_ or _queen._  And they don’t call her _Jenny._

No one ever calls her Jenny again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> When I started writing this story, I had a vague notion of how it had to end. It made me sad, and as I wrote that ending I became extremely emotional. All I can say now is thank you.
> 
> Thanks, guys. Everyone who's commented, left kudos, or just read. Some of your words have brightened very dark days for me, and I hope you know you are appreciated.
> 
> This has been so awesome, and I love you guys.


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